2021 Graduate Student Prize Winners
Rebecca Gruskin
“The Value within Multiform Commodities: North African Phosphates and Global Markets in the Interwar Period”
Journal of Global History (2021)
Phosphates mined in France’s North African empire fed interwar Europe’s voracious appetite for chemical fertilizers. In critique of histories vesting commodities with the agency to make the modern world, I trace not the substance but the value embedded within it. By following value, I argue that the “commodity” is not a stable unit of analysis. Rather, commodities are multiform. They can acquire myriad properties when the value embedded within them changes across time and place. Through North African phosphates, I explore value-making processes that perpetuated capital-intensive farming in the interwar period, allowing for an understanding of commodities as historical objects whose analytical boundaries and forms shifted across contexts.
Brittany Landorf
“Embodying Asceticism: Masculinity, Manliness, and the Male Body in Muḥammad al-ʿArabī al-Darqāwī’s Majmūʿ Rasāʾil”
Journal of Islamic Ethics (2020)
This study examines the logics of masculinity, manliness, and the corporeal male body in shaykh Muḥammad al-ʿArabī ibn Aḥmad al-Darqāwī al-Ḥasanī’s (d. 1239/1823) Majmūʿ Rasāʾil (“Collection of Epistles”). It argues that al-Darqāwī’s Rasāʾil constructed a prescriptive pious masculinity defined by mastery of the body and self, practical acts of ascetic devotion and humility, the hierarchical relationship between a Sufi master and his disciples, and the denigration of normative masculine virtues and behaviours. While al-Darqāwī instructed his followers to practice tajrīd, or divestment from the material world, and to eschew the habits of the men of murūʾa, this act did not seek to completely transcend the masculine body. Rather, his understanding of prescriptive pious masculinity was centred in embodied ascetic acts which created an analogous relationship between the physical act of purifying the corporeal body with the disciplining of the self (nafs). Mastering the body and the self, al-Darqāwī wrote, would lead to both growing near to God as well as, importantly, his Sufi followers’ mastery over other men, their wives and children, and even the natural environment. Al-Darqāwī’s Rasāʾil highlight the tension between Sufism as a spiritual and mystical path that seems to transcend gender hierarchies with its imbrication in epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies shaped by a masculine way of being in the world.
Arielle Gordon
(Honorable Mention)
“From Guerrilla Girls to Zainabs: Reassessing the Figure of the “Militant Woman” in the Iranian Revolution”
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (2021)
Scholars have long accounted for representations of women in the Iranian Revolution by categorically classifying them as “devout mothers” or “heroic sisters,” embodied respectively in the Shiʾi archetypes of Fatima and Zainab. However, a closer look at images of militant women finds them residing within the traditions of their time, as part and parcel of an era of liberation movements in which the idiom of the female fighter featured prominently. This article takes a transnational look at tropes of women’s militancy and traces how they filtered into Iranian revolutionary culture. Finally, it contends that only with the consolidation of Khomeini’s power and the start of the Iran-Iraq War is this figure renamed Zainab and sustained as a central icon of the Islamic Republic.