Authors

Camille Cole, Brittany Cook, and Gabi Kirk and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI)

Camille Cole is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Empire on Edge: Land, Law, and Capital in Gilded Age Basra,” examines how wealthy elites in late Ottoman Basra used state tools and vocabularies alongside legal and illegal environmental manipulation and novel financial practices to accumulate land. Her work can be found in the Journal of Social History, Middle Eastern Studies, and South Asian History and Culture. Beginning in Fall 2020, she will be a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge.


Brittany Cook is an Assistant Professor in Geography at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 2018, she received her PhD in Geography with a graduate certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include organic agriculture and standardization, critical development studies, political ecology, feminist geopolitics, feminist methodologies, and the international political economy of rural development projects. She has worked in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and community mapping in the US and Palestine and conducted qualitative research in Cyprus, Palestine, and Jordan. Her work can be found inAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (forthcoming), Journal of Rural Studies, Geoforum, and Space and Polity.

Gabi Kirk is a PhD Candidate in Geography with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research at the University of California, Davis. Working between political ecology, feminist geography, and geographies of colonialism, her dissertation project examines how Palestinian farmers and sustainable development organizations in the northern West Bank use agro-ecology in projects of identity formation and struggles for sovereignty. She also has a project on the critical history of agricultural science which looks at transnational circuits of agricultural and infrastructural expertise between California and Palestine from the 19th century onward. She has a personal and intellectual interest in interrogating Zionist claims to “Jewish indigeneity” through environmentalism. She has published, solo and collaboratively, both academic and popular pieces, including in Journal of Political Ecology, Society and Space, and PROTOCOLS.

ARTICLES BY Camille Cole, Brittany Cook, and Gabi Kirk and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI)