2024-2025
Adey Almohsen
Adey Almohsen studies the history of intellectual networks, ideas, critique, and print culture in the Middle East and North Africa from the late eighteenth century to the present. His research and teaching interests include: modern MENA history, politics, and cultures; intellectual and literary histories of the Arab world; histories of Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict; nationalisms, modernisms, and radicalisms in the Arab and Third worlds; transnational intellectual histories of the long 19th and long 20th centuries; the Nahda and Arab critique; classical and modern Arabic poetry; modern Islamic thought; history of postcolonial studies; and Arab-American thought in the twentieth century.
Building on his award-winning doctoral dissertation, Adey Almohsen is currently finishing a monograph, In the Nakba's Wake: An Intellectual History of Palestine 1948–70, set to investigate the contested history of Palestinian thought—and its Arab discontents—in the wake of national ruin and to examine the ideas and lives of Palestinian writers dispersed across Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Gaza, Jerusalem, Khartoum, and Kuwait. In the Nakba's Wake is primed on the untranslated and ignored expressions of Palestinian and Arab thought as they appeared in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, scrapbooks, poetry volumes, correspondences, and ephemera. Adey Almohsen's research has consistently attracted funding from institutions and foundations in the Middle East, Europe, and the US. Most recently, Adey Almohsen was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for the completion of the book project.
Shira Pinhas
Shira Pinhas is a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at Princeton University’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Pinhas is a historian of the social and material history of Palestine/Israel and the broader Levant region. Her research focuses on understanding how new infrastructures and technologies, along with transnational flows of energy, materials, capital, and labor, shaped political hierarchies and social subjectivities during the twentieth century.
Her current book project, titled The Moment of Oil: Infrastructures of Empire and Nation in Mandate Palestine, traces how the construction of oil infrastructures – the Kirkuk-Haifa-Tripoli pipelines, the Haifa refinery, asphalt-roads, and the cars that traveled on them – dramatically reconfigured the Zionist-Palestinian struggle for control of the land. It demonstrates how these infrastructures, which both physically and socially connected Palestine to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan, also created spatial segregation between Arabs and Jews and laid the groundwork for the plan to partition Palestine. The book is based on her dissertation, which was awarded the Best Dissertation Award by The Middle East & Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI).
Her second book project, titled Masters of War: The Making of a Global Arms Empire, explores how late-imperial economic development co-constituted the emergence of a growing arms industry in the Middle East. It examines how industrial development, particularly concessions granted by the British government, facilitated—and how their growth was enhanced by—the manufacture and trafficking of arms.
Before joining Princeton, Pinhas was a Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and completed her PhD at Tel Aviv University. Before her graduate studies, she spent a decade as a community organizer in Palestinian-Jewish NGOs promoting social change.
Website: https://princeton.academia.edu/ShiraPinhas