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,…
Josephine Chaet is a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and an ACOR-CAORC pre-doctoral fellow for the summer and fall of 2019. Prior to her current fellowship at ACOR, Josephine was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Jordan during the 2018-2019 academic year. Her research while at ACOR…
Michael Morris is an ACOR-CAORC post-doctoral fellow in fall 2018, currently working to conserve two marble Aphrodite figures found at Petra’s North Ridge Excavations conducted under ACOR Board members S. Thomas Parker and Megan Perry. After an initial polychrome study by Mark Abbe, these extraordinary figures will be conserved and exhibited in the new Petra…
Jennifer Olmsted is an ACOR-CAORC post-doctoral fellow in fall 2018. She is a Professor of Economics and Business and the Director of the Social Entrepreneurship Semester at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Her research while at ACOR centers on gender, displacement, and economic and social sustainability. Growing up in Beirut and witnessing the beginning…
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…
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…
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…
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 fifth video in the series, adapted from the February 2016 ACOR public lecture delivered by Dr. Andrew McCarthy, has two parts. The first relates how the Cyprus…
