The concept of return is an intoxicating analytic for scholars, for several reasons. The idea that migrants return home creates opportunities to reclaim them from the hegemony of the bordered nation-state. For diaspora theorists, return works as a rebuttal to the field’s preoccupations with exile and loss. Migrants return home all the time, t…[Read more]

In this piece, I first introduce Pera’s nineteenth-century sewers as a gateway
to exploring the district’s interconnections with its surrounding geographies,
which requires a close study of infrastructural plans. I then propose the
methodological virtues of juxtaposing these with insurance maps, frequently
utilized in the conventional his…[Read more]

Review of Peter H. Christensen, Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

In the Arabic-speaking mahjar (diaspora), the plight of the working poor was the focus of women’s philanthropy. Scholarship on welfare relief in the interwar Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian diaspora currently situates it within a gendered politics of benevolence. This article reconsiders that frame and argues for a class-centered reassessment o…[Read more]

This course explores histories of forced migration in the Middle East and South Asia during the twentieth century. Looking at the role of colonialism, partition, and social unrest in driving the movement of refugees, IDPs, and stateless peoples, we examine how everyday struggles for refugee protection, asylum, and citizenship influence regional…[Read more]