Arbella Bet-Shlimon (she)

I am a historian of the modern Middle East. I am also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and an affiliate of the Jackson School's Middle East Center. My first book, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019), explores how oil and urbanization made ethnicity into a political practice in Kirkuk, a multilingual city that was the original hub of Iraq's oil industry. I teach general introductory courses on the modern Middle East and upper-division courses on specialized topics such as historiography; urban history; and the politics, society, and economy of the Persian Gulf. My teaching has been recognized with several awards, including UW's Distinguished Teaching Award.

In my research, I reframe histories of the nation-state—particularly in Iraq and the Gulf region—by examining cities, borderlands, and resources. I seek to understand how people practice politics via emerging forms of identification and how those concepts develop in relation to empire, colonialism, state-making, and transformations in infrastructure and the built environment. I critically explore concepts like ethnicity and nation, as well as the phenomena of crisis, intercommunal violence, and mass atrocity. In City of Black Gold, I show how Kirkuk became segregated and polarized through British colonialism, urban development schemes, the expansion of the oil industry, and Baghdad's systematic attempts to integrate Kirkuk into an Arabized Iraq. I am currently working on a project on colonialism and anticolonialism across Iraq and Kuwait that asks how colonized people articulate their political aspirations in places where imperial relationships overlap and intertwine. In particular, I ask: how do such processes play out in a region central to the fossil-fuel industry that is severely affected by climate change, and one that is (or was) characterized by frequent migration?

My experiences as an Assyrian inform my scholarship and teaching. I have supported work in Assyrian/Syriac history at UW through my graduate advising and public-facing events, such as a UW Libraries exhibit in 2022.

My research has been funded by the Institute of Historical Research, University of London; the American Historical Association; and UW's Simpson Center for the Humanities. My work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Journal of Urban History; Arab Studies Journal; Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World; Jadaliyya; and Middle East Report. I am on the board of the Academic Research Institute in Iraq.

Information on my publications is available via Google Scholar and ORCID.