Nelida Fuccaro
Professor of Middle Eastern History
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD, University of Durham(UK), Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Research Areas: history of the modern Middle East
Professor Fuccaro specializes in the history of the modern Middle East with a focus on the Arab World, particularly Iraq, the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, Arabian Peninsula, and Kurdistan. Although a regional specialist, she has a keen interest in cross-regional and inter-disciplinary approaches to the study of urban history, oil societies and cultures, public violence, and historical borderlands.
She is the author of The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq (IB Tauris 1999), Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge University Press 2009); co-editor of Urban Violence in the Middle East: Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire to Nation State (Berghahn, 2015); editor of ‘Histories of Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East’ (thematic issue in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2013) and Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2016). She has also published articles on port cities, colonial knowledge, ethnicity, and nationalism.
Professor Fuccaro’s recent research investigates the diverse histories of visual, materialand public cultures of oil in the Middle East and is located at the intersection of History, Social and Visual Anthropology, the Energy Humanities, and Science and Technology Studies. She has edited with Mandana Limbert Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil: Histories and Ethnographies of Black Gold (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and is writing a monograph on the material and public worlds of petroleum in the twentieth-century Middle East. She is one of the founders of the collective OCMELA (Oil Cultures of the Middle East and South America), an interdisciplinary group that brings together area studies specialists, bridging academic and artistic research.
Professor Fuccaro's research has been supported by grants from the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Arts and Humanities Research Council, Social Science Research Council and Deutsche Forschungemeinschaft. Before joining NYU Abu Dhabi she has taught at the University of Exeter and SOAS, University of London.