Office Hours:
M: 1:30-3:00pm
W: 9:00-10:30am
Research Interests
My research centers on “globalization,” migration, development, and environmental/cultural heritage in the Middle East and North-East Africa. Recently, I have conducted ethnographic research in Soqotra, a Yemeni island off the Horn of Africa that was declared a “World Heritage Site” in July 2008 in recognition of its astounding biodiversity. In the past decade, and largely as the result of an UN-funded Integrated Conservation and Development Program, this once relatively “isolated” island has been drawn increasingly into global networks and discourses of development, conservation, and heritage-production. My research was carried out in one of the newly created Protected Areas where I observed the material and otherwise transformative effects of this emergent environmental regime upon its pastoral population’s welfare and sense of wellbeing. Previous to this, in Somaliland, I looked at the effects of deportation on Somalis deported from the United States and Canada to Mogadishu following the events of September 11, 2001. Deportation is a fascinating lens through which to examine statehood, sovereignty, citizenship, and migration – my interest in this routine state (and global) practice materialized in a co-edited interdisciplinary volume, “The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement,” forthcoming in Fall 2009. While these two separate projects are in many ways divergent, together they have directed my focus toward both the radical displacements (through deportation) and the radical ‘emplacements’ (through heritage regimes) that so-called “globalization” engenders.
Courses Taught at Middlebury College 2008-2009
SOAN/HIST 0268 Recovering the Past: Heritage, History, and Memory in the Modern Middle East
SOAN 1011 New Media and Pop Culture in the Middle East
SOAN/WAGS 0269 Class and Gender in the Contemporary Middle East
Academic Publications
Forthcoming. (Peutz, Nathalie and Nicholas De Genova). “Introduction.” In Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz. eds. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Forthcoming. “‘Criminal Alien’ Deportees in Somaliland: An Ethnography of Removal.” In Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2008. “Reorienting Heritage: Poetic Exchanges between Suqutra and the Gulf.” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 121-122: 165-183.
2007. “Out-laws: Deportees, Desire, and ‘The Law.’” Special Issue: "Illegal" and "Irregular" Migrants' Lived Experiences of Law and State Power. International Migration, 45(3): 182-191.
2006. “Embarking on an Anthropology of Removal,” with “CA* Commentary” and a “Reply by the Author.” Current Anthropology 47(2): 217-241.
2006. “Of Goats and Foreigners: Research Lessons on Soqotra Island, Yemen.” Pp. 79-97 in Andrew Gardner and David Hoffman, eds. Dispatches from the Field: Neophyte Anthropologists in a Changing World. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
2005. “Signpost in Somaliland’s Quest for Sovereignty.” Middle East Report Online, September 28.