Call for Applications: PhD Fellowship in Indian Ocean World and Middle Eastern Environmental History (Iowa State University)

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Sep 14, 2018 United States
Call for Applications: PhD Fellowship in Indian Ocean World and Middle Eastern Environmental History (Iowa State University)

Call for Applications: PhD Fellowship in Indian Ocean World and Middle Eastern Environmental History (Iowa State University)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Iowa State University’s PhD program in Rural, Agricultural, Technological and Environmental (RATE) History invites applications for a 6-year, fully-funded PhD fellowship in Indian Ocean World and Middle Eastern Environmental History. Iowa State University is a partner with McGill University’s Indian Ocean World Centre and an international team of nearly two dozen universities and centers across the globe. Our partnership project, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present: Interrogating Historical Data to Enhance Understanding of Environmental Crises in the Indian Ocean World,” has been awarded a 2.5 million-dollar (Canadian) partnership grant by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Historians, anthropologists, and social and environmental scientists will examine the social, economic, and political impacts of natural disasters across the world’s most populous and unstable macro-region, stretching from East Africa, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf to India, Southeast Asia, and China. By examining past and present patterns of natural hazards from epidemic disease, monsoon failure, and drought to tsunamis, volcanic activity, and global climate change, this project seeks to better understand how the societies of the Indian Ocean world have adapted to environmental risk across time.

In support of this project and the partnership’s Middle East team, Iowa State University seeks a PhD student in Environmental History with one or more of the following research interests and skills:

  • Geographical Foci: Late Ottoman Empire, the Modern Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and/or trans-regional projects connecting the Middle East with other regions in the Western Indian Ocean, including East Africa and South Asia
  • Time Period: 18th-Late 20th centuries
  • Language Skills: We are especially interested in receiving applications from students with native fluency or advanced competencies in Turkish/Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and/or South Asian languages. However, we also welcome research interests based on English and European colonial archival sources.
  • The accepted student will be expected to work closely with Dr. Michael Christopher Low, Assistant Professor and Partnership Coordinator. In addition to the normal requirements of the PhD program, the accepted student will be expected to assist with Iowa State’s contributions to the McGill-SSHRC partnership project. Dr. Low will serve as this student’s primary advisor and oversee his or her work in support of the partnership. For a description of Low’s research and teaching interests, please see: https://history.iastate.edu/directory/michael-christopher-low/

What We Offer:

As part of this prestigious international grant project and generously funded fellowship, the prospective student will receive the following package of support:

  • With generous support from the ISU Department of History, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the Vice President, this fellowship will provide six years of guaranteed funding (dependent on satisfactory progress to degree).
  • The student will receive an annual stipend of approximately $25,000 (12-month appointment).
  • Health insurance
  • Tuition Waver

Unique Benefits Provided by the McGill-SSHRC Partnership Grant:

In addition to the financial support provided by Iowa State University, the prospective student will also gain exclusive access to a unique array of partnership opportunities. We expect these activities and resources to include:

  • Research collaboration with partner universities and centers in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Tanzania, Turkey, the United Kingdom
  • Access to databases and digitized archival sources from McGill University’s Indian Ocean World Centre
  • Summer research funding opportunities
  • Funded participation in international summer schools hosted by partners on four continents
  • Publication opportunities (including journals, edited books, working papers, and podcasts)
  • Opportunities for funded conference travel
  • Institutional affiliations and office space at select partner universities
  • Access to mentoring from internationally renowned scholars at our partner institutions

For More Information:

For further information on the partnership and fellowship application procedures, please contact:

Michael Christopher Low

Assistant Professor, Department of History
McGill-SSHRC Partnership Coordinator
Faculty Profile: https://history.iastate.edu/directory/michael-christopher-low/
Email: low@iastate.edu

For more information about the Iowa State University Department of History, please visit:
https://history.iastate.edu

For more information about our RATE PhD program, please visit:
https://history.iastate.edu/graduate-study/rate-ph-d/program-overview/ 

For more information on McGill University’s Indian Ocean World Centre and the Partnership project, please visit:
https://indianoceanworldcentre.com

How To Apply:


For admission to the PhD program, please fill out all application materials required by the Iowa State Graduate College and Office of Admissions. To apply, please visit:

https://www.grad-college.iastate.edu/academics/programs/apresults.php?id=139

  • All applicants will be required to submit GRE scores to the Iowa State Graduate College (the specialized History GRE is not required).
  • All applicants whose native language is not English must take the TOEFL examination and submit that score to the Iowa State Graduate College. A TOEFL Paper (PBT) score of at least 600, TOEFL Internet (iBT) score of at least 100, or IELTS score of at least 7.0 is expected to merit consideration for admittance to the program.
  • Applications to the Graduate College and Office of Admissions must include a personal statement explaining your reasons for wishing to enter graduate school, outlining your scholarly interests, and describing their appropriateness for this fellowship.
  • Three letters of recommendation are required. Recommenders should be able to evaluate your ability to engage in advanced historical research and analysis in your area of study. Applicants may submit letters of recommendation via the Graduate College and Office of Admissions or directly to the Director of Graduate Education, Michael Bailey: mdbailey@iastate.edu.
  • All applicants must submit a writing sample of no more than 25 pages of representative academic work with their application or send it directly to the Director of Graduate Education, Michael Bailey: mdbailey@iastate.edu.

All application materials must be submitted no later than December 15, 2018. Please note that this date differs from the deadline for normal applications to the Iowa State University RATE PhD program.
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412