Extractive Capitalism in the Middle East: Past & Present

The CMES Environmental Studies of the Middle East Speaker Series is pleased to present a panel on 'Extractive Capitalism in the Middle East', featuring

Elif İrem Az, CMES Postdoctoral fellow in Disaster Studies, Harvard University
Mattin Biglari, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Asian and Middle Eastern Environmental History, University of Bristol
Rebecca Gruskin, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Hamilton College
Zeynep Oguz, Lecturer in Anthropology of Development, School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh

Discussant: Deren Ertas, PhD candidate, CMES, Harvard

Please note: this talk will be held in CGIS Knafel 262.

Elif İrem Az is an anthropologist, writer, poet, and postdoctoral fellow in disaster studies at Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University in 2023. Her research interests lie at the intersections of disaster, labor, disability, ecological unpredictability, and political possibility. Her book project (tentatively titled Mining Interruption) explores the afterlives of the Soma mine disaster of May 2014, which took the lives of 301 coal miners in Aegean Turkey.

Mattin Biglari is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Asian and Middle Eastern Environmental History at the University of Bristol. He is also an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher at SOAS, University of London, where he completed his PhD. His research focuses on the history of oil in Iran and the Middle East, connecting energy/environmental humanities, science & technology studies, and subaltern studies. His monograph, titled Refining Knowledge: Labour, Expertise and Oil Nationalisation in Iran will be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2024. He is now researching a comparative environmental history of oil refineries across the Indian Ocean in the era of global decolonisation.

Rebecca Gruskin is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Hamilton College. Her scholarship spans environmental history, social history, and the history of capitalism in modern North Africa. Her current book project, Capitalism’s Nature: A Global History of Mining, Empire, and Resistance in Tunisia, traces ecologies of capitalism and resistance in colonial Tunisia’s Gafsa phosphate mines. Her most recent article, on the politics of X-ray imaging and mining injuries in Gafsa, is forthcoming in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Gruskin received her PhD from Stanford University and held a postdoctoral fellowship in global history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Zeynep Oguz is Lecturer in the Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. She teaches courses on sustainable development, energy transitions, resource politics, and environmental anthropology. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Political Geography, Journal of Cultural Economy, and Environmental Humanities. Oguz’s current book project explores the coming together of colonial politics, geopolitical imaginaries, and resistance around oil exploration and geology in Turkey's Kurdistan region.

Contact: Liz Flanagan