Nora Barakat and Ussama Makdisi | Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Please join us for the first Eurasian Empires workshop meeting of the 2023-24 academic rear. Nora Barakat will share a chapter from her new book, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2023), with comments from Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and Chancellor's Chair at the University of California, Berkeley.


 

About the Speakers

Nora Elizabeth Barakat is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the legal, social, and economic history of the Arabic-speaking regions of the late Ottoman Empire, the Modern Middle East and the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. Her first book, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire, came out with Stanford University Press in 2023. Barakat’s current book project explores the intersections between the history of capitalism and late Ottoman civil law and their twentieth-century legacies from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.

Barakat will be in conversation with Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley. He was previously Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston. During the 2019-20 academic year, Makdisi was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of History. In 2012-13, Makdisi was an invited resident fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin). In April 2009, the Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a 2009 Carnegie Scholar as part of its effort to promote original scholarship regarding Muslim societies and communities, both in the United States and abroad. Makdisi was awarded the Berlin Prize and spent the Spring 2018 semester as a fellow at the American Academy of Berlin. Makdisi’s most recent book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World, was published in 2019 by the University of California Press. He is also the author of Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs, 2010).  His previous books include Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), which was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies.