Participant Info
- First Name
- Arbella
- Last Name
- Bet-Shlimon
- Country
- United States
- State
- WA Washington
- shlimon@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- University of Washington
- Website URL
- https://history.washington.edu/people/arbella-bet-shlimon
- Keywords
- Iraq, Modern Middle East, Persian Gulf, urban history, environmental history, colonialism, ethnicity, identity formation, disputed territory, borderlands, oil
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am a historian of the modern Middle East at the University of Washington, Seattle. I have a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University (2012) and a master’s degree in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan (2006).
My first book, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019), explores how oil and urbanization made ethnicity into a political practice in Kirkuk, a multilingual city that was the original hub of Iraq’s oil industry. I find that, over the course of the twentieth century, Kirkuk transformed from a provincial town into a prominent symbol of urban modernity, developing a distinct civic identity. However, the city became segregated and polarized as a result of British neocolonialism, urban development schemes, the expansion of the oil industry, and Baghdad’s systematic attempts to integrate Kirkuk into an Arabized Iraq. Today, claims to Kirkuk’s identity, as in so many disputed cities, have become reduced to a zero-sum game between ethnic communities—a phenomenon that, far from being predictable or inevitable, requires a historical perspective to be fully understood.
My research has been funded by, among others, the American Historical Association, the UW Royalty Research Fund, and the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. I have published articles in the Journal of Urban History and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. I am on the board of the Academic Research Institute in Iraq.
- Recent Publications
City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019)
“Preservation or Plunder? The ISIS Files and a History of Heritage Removal in Iraq,” Middle East Report Online (May 8, 2018), https://www.merip.org/mero/mero050818
- Media Coverage
- Recently: The Intercept (https://interc.pt/2khSdhB), The Daily (http://www.dailyuw.com/news/article_d82d1648-0237-11e8-9083-1bd3402cbeb5.html), The Arab Weekly (https://shar.es/ane3tl)
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- Iraq
- Expertise by Geography
- Middle East
- Expertise by Chronology
- Modern, 20th century, 21st century
- Expertise by Topic
- Colonialism, Environment, Urban History
