Academic interests
I am a cultural and transnational historian of the modern Middle East. My research and teaching focus on the history of leisure, labor, and cultural production. I focus specifically on Iraq, but my work simultaneously explores transregional and transnational connections, highlighting everyday perspectives and voices often left out by traditional political and state-centered histories. Currently, I am a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Roskilde University in Denmark, where I worked on the ‘Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left’ project. I received my PhD with honors from the University of Chicago in 2020. My dissertation, “Between Work and School: Leisure and Modernity in Hashemite Baghdad, 1921-1958,” was awarded Best Dissertation on Modern/Medieval Iraq by the Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARI).
My Marie Curie project, “Iraqi Cinema Beyond the Screen,” is supervised by Toufoul Abou-Hodeib and explores the history of cinema in Iraq, a subject that has received virtually no scholarly attention. “Iraqi Cinema Beyond the Screen” is a cultural, material, and transnational history of cinema, technology, labour, capital, and infrastructure in twentieth-century Iraq. The project interrogates the transnational circulation of cultural products and material objects, including films and technology, and explores how they came together at a particular historical moment with capital, performers, and people with technical skills to establish cinema as a form of leisure in Iraq.
On the basis of my dissertation, I am preparing a book manuscript entitled Idle Days and Nights: Leisure, Time, and Modernity in Iraq. The book, which extends the dissertation’s temporal scope from the mandate to the early years of the republican period, argues that leisure in twentieth century Iraq became one of several frontiers upon which the individual and citizen came into contact with, confronted, and interacted with new ideas about gender, sexuality, class, time, labour, and discipline. The book draws upon my dissertation wherein I traced the cultural, transregional, and transnational history of new urban practices of leisure in Baghdad. Idle Days and Nights draws on Arabic and Hebrew archival records, fiction and poetry, photography, popular song and music, periodicals, and published works held in institutions in Lebanon, Iraq, the UK, Italy, Israel, and the US. Examining the new institutions, practices, and distractions of leisure that took up increasing space and time in the life of Iraqis, the book explores uncharted aspects of both modern Iraqi and Middle Eastern history.
Background
Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022), Global Studies, Roskilde University
Ph.D. History (2020), Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
MPhil Middle Eastern Studies (2014), University of Oxford, St. Antony’s College
BA Middle Eastern Studies (2012), University of Copenhagen
Awards
- Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies Annual Graduate Student Paper Prize (2018)
- University of Chicago Urban Doctoral Fellowship (2016-17)
- Two-year Hanna Gray Fellowship, University of Chicago (awarded to one student in the humanities each year (2018)
- The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARI) dissertation award for Best Dissertation on Modern/Medieval Iraq (2021)
- My research has received support from the Fulbright Commission, The Carlsberg Foundation, Danish Institute in Damascus, the German Orient Institute Beirut, the Danish Academy in Rome, the University of Chicago Center in Paris, the University of Chicago Center for Jewish Studies, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies
Publications
BOOK PROJECT
Idle Days and Nights: Leisure, Time, and Modernity in Iraq Book manuscript under
preparation for submission to Stanford University Press.
EDITED VOLUMES
Palestine in the World: International Solidarity with the Palestinian Liberation Movement, co-edited with Sorcha Thomson. London: I.B. Tauris (forthcoming).
Ruling the Waves: Transnational Radio Broadcasting in the Middle East and the Mediterranean between Production and Reception, 1920-1970, co-edited with Peter Wien et. al. Manuscript under preparation for submission to publisher.
ARTICLES IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS
“Cruising Baghdad: Desire Between Men in the 1930s Fiction of Dhu al-Nun Ayyub.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 14: 1 (2018): 25-44.
“Al-Qahira-Baghdad: The Transnational and Transregional History of Iraq’s Early Cinema Industry.” Arab Studies Journal 29: 2 (2021): 8-33.
“Early Iraqi Cinema and the Archives of Leisure.” Regards 25 (2021): 129-141.
“At the Juncture of Internationalization: Palestine Solidarity Conferences in the Global Sixties,” with Sune Haugbølle, and Sorcha Thompson. Journal of Palestine Studies 51 (2022): 27-49.
“The Emergence of Palestine as a Global Cause,” with Sune Haugbølle, Middle East Critique, (forthcoming).
“The Riḥlas and Road Trips of Modern Iraqi Literature: Safa’ Khulūsī’s Abū Nuwās fī Amrīkā,” with Rachel N. Schine, Journal of Arabic Literature (forthcoming).
“The Legal and Medical Categorization of Juvenile Delinquency in Hashemite Iraq, 1921- 1958,” with Sara Farhan, Journal of Social History (forthcoming).
BOOK CHAPTERS
“Iraqi Jews and the Emergence of Cinema Culture in Hashemite Iraq,” in Jews of Iraq: Engagement with Modernities, edited by Orit Bashkin, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, (forthcoming).
“Nocturnal Baghdad: Nightlife, Performance, and Sex Work,” in Popular Entertainment in the Age of the Nahda: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Raphael Cormack et. al. London: I.B. Tauris, (forthcoming).
“Nursing the Revolution: Norwegian Medical Support in Lebanon as Solidarity, 1976-1983,” in Iran, Palestine and 1979: The Fate of Third-Worldism in the Middle East, edited by Rasmus Elling and Sune Haugbolle. London: One World Publications, (forthcoming).
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia, by Zainab Saleh (Stanford 2020), Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World 15: 2 (2022).
Review of Queer Beirut, by Sofian Merabet (Texas 2014), H-Levant, H-Net Reviews, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48003 (2018).
Review of Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine, by Lital Levy (Princeton 2014), Journal of Middle Eastern Culture and Communication. 9: 2 (2016).
OUTREACH
“Pelle Valentin Olsen, “Al-Qahira-Baghdad: The Transnational and Transregional History of Iraq’s Early Cinema Industry” (New Texts Out Now),” Jadaliyya, (2022). Arabic version: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44209/القاهرة-بغداد-التاريخ-العابر-للحدود-الوطنية-والإقليمية-لبدايات-صناعة-السينما-في-العراق
“Jesuit Archives and Research Center, Saint Louis (MO),” Hazine, http://hazine.info/jesuit-archives-research-center-jarc/ (2018).
“Idle Days in Baghdad: A Brief History of the Coffee Shop in Iraq,” Standart Magazine, Issue 5, June (2018).
“History of Surfing, Coffee Shops, and Idleness,” Interview for Thinking Allowed, BBC Radio 4, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b047bzlj, June (2014).