by Clare Rasmussen The Roman Empire was one of many ancient civilizations that understood the necessity of a water supply system, and they became experts in building large aqueducts and urban water systems. They, along with the Greeks, spread new cultural institutions that required water to be used in ways that went beyond the communal…
CAORC Fellow
Diverging Paths: A Socio-archaeological Investigation of Rural Settlement in Ottoman Palestine and Transjordan
by Lauren Erker Rural life in Jordan during the Ottoman period is a topic that has received little attention from archaeologists. While there is a rich corpus of historical writings on the late Ottoman period due to the Tanzimat reforms, archaeological literature on the subject remains scant. Any tour across the landscape of Jordan will reveal remains…
Animal Lives at Petra
by Kathryn Grossman I have been in Jordan for two months now, and Tom Parker’s presence is everywhere—in my work, in conversations with colleagues, on the stiff breeze at Petra. Despite twenty years in Near Eastern archaeology, this is my first time working in Jordan; I had just imagined he would be here when I…
Jordanian Women and the Digital Economy During COVID-19
by Allison J. Anderson Jordan’s low female labor force participation rate has long confounded policymakers, researchers, and activists. Despite achieving progress on several determinants of female labor force participation over the last decade, including increasing levels of female educational attainment, higher ages of marriage, and lower rates of fertility, less than 15 percent of women are…
Ethnographic Research on Graffiti/Street Art, Youth, and Urban Space in Amman
by Kyle Benedict Craig With support from an ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellowship, I conducted dissertation fieldwork on Amman’s graffiti/street art scene from May to August 2021. During this period of on-site fieldwork, I attended art exhibitions, observed graffiti/street art painting sessions, participated in walking tours of Amman’s public art scene, and conducted semiformal interviews with artists,…
Konstantinos D. Politis, ACOR-CAORC Post-Doctoral Fellow Fall 2019
Dr. Konstantinos D. Politis is an ACOR-CAORC Post-Doctoral Fellow in the fall of 2019. Dr. Politis is chairperson of the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Studies, and he leads an ongoing excavation of Zoara, modern Safi in Jordan. During his ACOR fellowship, he plans to complete studies of the finds from Khirbet Qazone where he…
Reviewing the Temple of the Winged Lions (TWL), Petra: Digging through Forty Years of Archives
Dr. Pauline Piraud-Fournet is an archaeologist, architect, and associate researcher at the French Institute of the Near East. In 2019, she was the recipient of a six month TWL Publication Fellowship at ACOR. In 2016, she received her Ph.D. in Archaeology on the topic of ‘the city of Bosra’ (Southern Syria) in Late Antiquity from…
History of Legal Challenges in Jordan in the 1950s
Kimberly Katz was an ACOR-CAORC post-doctoral fellow for summer 2019, and she will return in summer 2020 to complete her fellowship. She was also awarded the ACOR-MESA Travel Award for 2019. She is the Professor of Middle East History at Towson University in Maryland. Her research interests focus on legal history in Jordan and the…
William Tamplin , ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellow Fall 2019
William Tamplin is a doctoral candidate (2020) in Comparative Literature at Harvard University and an ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellow for the fall of 2019. While at ACOR, he will research and interview for his dissertation on apocalypticism in the modern Jordanian novel. Will’s dissertation is on apocalypticism in the modern Arabic novel. An analytic category associated…
José Ciro Martínez, ACOR-CAORC Post-Doctoral Fellow Summer 2019
Dr. José Ciro Martínez is an ACOR-CAORC post-doctoral fellow for summer 2019, and also Title A Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. During his ACOR fellowship, Dr. Martínez will be completing his first monograph, based on his PhD dissertation. It is provisionally entitled, The Politics of Bread: Performing the State in Hashemite Jordan….
Kimberly Katz, ACOR-CAORC Post-Doctoral Fellow Summer 2019
Kimberly Katz is an ACOR-CAORC post-doctoral fellow for summer 2019 and Professor of Middle East History at Towson University in Maryland. Her current research interests focus on legal history in Jordan and the West Bank. She is analyzing the transition from the British Mandate-era Penal Code to the Jordanian Penal Code that followed the Unification…
Julia Gettle, ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellow Spring 2019
Julia Gettle is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Brown University and an ACOR-CAORC pre-doctoral fellow for spring 2019. Her research while at ACOR focuses on the social and intellectual history of popular politics in mid-20th century Greater Syria, particularly centering on Pan-Arab nationalist, nation-state nationalist, and Marxist political mobilization in the 1950s and 1960s….
Amy Karoll, ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellow Spring 2019
Amy Karoll is a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles and an ACOR-CAORC Pre-doctoral Fellow in spring 2019. Prior to arrival at Amman, she was at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem as an ECA Predoctoral Fellow in fall 2018. Her research focuses…
From Virginia to the Dead Sea: Lieutenant William Francis Lynch and the 21st Century
[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…
Frances Hasso, ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow, Spring 2018
Frances S. Hasso is an Associate Professor in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University with secondary appointments in the faculties of Sociology and History. She is an Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. Before she joined Duke University in 2010, she taught for 10 years as a faculty member at…