Sarah Islam is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Princeton University and an ACOR-CAORC pre-doctoral fellow for 2015–2016. In order to complete her research project, which deals with the evolving historical discourse on blasphemy as an Islamic legal category, from the medieval period until the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Islam needed to painstakingly…
CAORC
Susynne McElrone, ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow, Fall 2017
Susynne McElrone, a historian studying late-Ottoman Palestine, is interested in rural socioeconomic history, land tenure, and the implementation of property-tenure reforms following the promulgation of the 1858 Land Code. Significantly, Ottoman property-tenure reforms in the second half of the 19th century continue to influence land tenure in the Levant today. They institutionalized individually held, centrally…
Studying a Hard-to-Reach Population of Syrian Refugees
Political scientist and ACOR-CAORC fellow Rana B. Khoury was in Jordan during fall 2016 researching networks of Syrian activists. She writes below about her research methodology. As researchers, we ask many questions related to the characteristics of populations. How many voters plan to go to the polls on election day? How satisfied are citizens with…
Producing Extra Virginity in Jordan
Brittany Barrineau, ACOR-CAORC pre-doctoral fellow for 2016–2017, writes below about her research into the social, political, and economic forces that are transforming Jordan’s traditional but rapidly evolving olive oil industry. The olive harvest festival in Irbid included an outdoor opening ceremony with poetry, several speakers, two dance groups, a marching band, and a small speech…
Khirbat Iskandar—A New View of Urbanism in Early Bronze Age Jordan
Recent ACOR-CAORC fellow and senior archaeologist Suzanne Richard writes below about how her ongoing excavations at the central Jordan site of Khirbat Iskander are revising long-held views of the Early Bronze Age urban collapse. In the southern Levant, cities were destroyed and/or abandoned and urbanism disappeared at the end of what scholars call the Early…
The Levantine Early Bronze Age — An ACOR Video Lecture by Dr. Suzanne Richard
The ACOR Video Lecture Series provides accessible discussions of new research into the past and present of Jordan and the broader Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean worlds. This video, adapted from the September 2016 ACOR public lecture delivered by Dr. Suzanne Richard, examines the site of Khirbat Iskandar in light of ongoing research and new…
Between Past and Present at Bir Madhkur
Archaeologist and recent ACOR-CAORC Fellow Andrew M. Smith II writes below about his ongoing research at the important Nabataean-Roman site of Bir Madhkur in Jordan’s Wadi Araba and how USAID SCHEP has been supporting efforts to increase awareness of the site’s important remains. During my recent fellowship at ACOR, I was pursuing two interrelated and…
Sarah Islam, CAORC Fellow at ACOR, Fall 2016
Sarah Islam is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at Princeton University and a CAORC Fellow at ACOR in the fall of 2016. Her research project, “The Evolution of Blasphemy as Legal Category in Medieval Islamic History,” examines how interpretations of blasphemy—known as sabb— in Islam have varied based on time period, geography and…
Brittany Barrineau, CAORC Fellow at ACOR, Fall 2016
Brittany Barrineau is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the University of Kentucky and an ACOR-CAORC Fellow in the fall of 2016. Her research project, “Exporting Heritage and Highlighting Politics: Extra Virgin Olive Oil Production in Jordan,” examines how state power, international geopolitics and place based identities converge in the complex relationship between farmers, their…
Michael Vincente Perez, CAORC Senior Fellow at ACOR, Fall 2016
Dr. Michael Vincente Perez is a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle and in the fall of 2016 he is an ACOR-CAORC Senior Fellow. His research project, titled “Surviving Statelessness: Gaza Refugees and the Politics of Living in Jordan,” is focused on the community of Gaza refugees and their descendants in…
Rana B. Khoury, CAORC Fellow at ACOR Fall 2016-17
How do regular people respond and adapt to “major structural changes that upend normal social processes?” This question is at the heart of Rana B. Khoury’s work, which explores the new “normal” that civilians in Syria have created in response to the Syrian civil war. Inspired to “tell the stories of individuals and communities experiencing…
Life After Collapse: Water and Environment in the Late Neolithic of Southern Jordan
Recent ACOR-CAORC fellow and archaeologist Kathleen Bennallack writes below about her current research in southern Jordan. During the 2015–16 academic year, I spent more than six months at ACOR conducting dissertation research—learning stone tool types and how they change through time; learning how to read climate data; finding publications that are nearly impossible to find…
Framing Jordan: The Country Inside and Outside the Camera
Recent ACOR-CAORC fellow George Potter writes about his current research into Jordanian films and the social geography of locations in Jordan and Palestine included in those films. As I finish my research in Jordan, much of the world has turned its attention to the Summer Olympics. I spend most of my nights watching film, theater,…
Why We Need Drones – An ACOR Video Lecture by Dr. Austin “Chad” Hill
The ACOR Video Lecture Series provides accessible discussions of new research into the past and present of Jordan and the broader Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean worlds. This sixth video in the series, adapted from the May 2016 ACOR public lecture delivered by Dr. Austin “Chad” Hill, opens with a general discussion of drone technology…
Suzanne Richard, 2015–2016 CAORC Post Doctoral Fellow
Dr. Suzanne Richard is an ACOR-CAORC post-doctoral fellow in residence at ACOR in the summer and autumn of 2016. A distinguished professor of history and archaeology at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, she has been working in Jordan for more than thirty years. A leading expert in the archaeology and history of the Early Bronze…