[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In preparation for ACOR’s 50th Anniversary and twenty-five years after I first ‘discovered’ Lieutenant Lynch, I finally visited him. Commodore Lynch rests, posthumously, in Baltimore’s famous Greenmount Cemetery, less than ten miles from my home in Baltimore. His gravestone attests to his command of the Dead Sea Expedition of 1848, bears the name of his…
Dr. Frances S. Hasso is an ACOR-CAORC Post Doctoral Fellow in residence at ACOR in the Spring of 2018. She is an Associate Professor in the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke with secondary appointments in the History Department and the Sociology Department and an affiliate appointment in the Duke Middle East Studies…
Place Matters: Understanding Aid Work in Jordan through Cafe Interviews Patricia “Trish” Ward is an ACOR-CAORC Fellow, Fall 2017 and a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Boston University. Her research looks at questions related to humanitarian aid, migration management, and labor in contexts considered crisis zones. She writes below about her experiences interviewing aid workers…
Ian W. N. Jones was an ACOR-CAORC Fellow, Fall 2017. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. He writes below about his research into copper production in the Feynan region during the Ayyubid period (late 12th to mid 13th century). It is a little ironic that southern Jordan’s Faynan…
Lillian Frost was an ACOR-CAORC Fellow, Fall 2017. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the George Washington University. Her research focuses on citizenship and refugee policies in Jordan. She writes below on gender and Jordan’s nationality law, drawing from extensive interview research over 12 months in Jordan. Jordanian women cannot pass their…
Zachary Sheldon is an ACOR-CAORC Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He writes below about his ongoing research which is focused on the Iraqi communities living in Jordan and particularly the experience of Iraqi young adults who have come of age in Amman. Today, there are about 140,000 Iraqis…
Steven Schaaf is an ACOR-CAORC Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the George Washington University. His research focuses on the comparative analysis of administrative courts in Jordan, Palestine and Egypt. Below he writes about the Jordanian administrative court system. When individuals and groups in the Arab world have grievances that involve state actors and…
Dr. Gary Rollefson, anthropologist and recent National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow at ACOR, writes below about his ongoing research in the desolate Black Desert of eastern Jordan. In 1980, Alison Betts, a doctoral student at the time, invited me to Jordan’s Black Desert to see what her research area looked like. After climbing to…
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 was adapted from the September 2017 public lecture delivered at ACOR by Dr. Geoffrey Hughes, ACOR-NEH Fellow and Fellow at the London School of Economics, whose research interests are focused on…
An ACOR Blog article by recent ACOR fellow Felicia De Peña on her research into stone tool making and experimental archaeology. Felicia was awarded the Kenneth W. Russell Fellowship (2017-2018). For years, I have been drawn to stone tools and the stories that they can tell us about our prehistoric ancestors; from subsistence strategies to…
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…
Geoffrey Hughes is a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellow at ACOR and an anthropologist and lecturer at the London School of Economics. He is residing at ACOR during summer 2017 while he pursues his project entitled, “Nation and Agnation: Kinship, Conflict, and Social Control in Contemporary Jordan.” His essay below is a brief…
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…
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…
Recent ACOR-CAORC senior fellow Michael Perez writes below about his recent research on ex-Gaza refugees who are currently living without citizenship in Jordan. Dr. Perez is a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. The Gaza camp is unique in Jordan. Located just a few kilometers from the ancient ruins of Jarash, it…