Dissertation to manuscript
At the University of Chicago in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, I completed a dissertation with distinction, titled Provincial, Not Peripheral: Ottoman-Iraqi Intellectuals and Cultural Networks, 1863-1914. This project examines the integration and active participation of Iraqi intellectuals within Ottoman and Arab political and cultural milieux. The perspective from the Ottoman state has been one to marginalize the Iraqi provinces as a place of semi-isolation and a cultural backwater. While this project does not intend to de-center Istanbul as the imperial capital or Beirut and Cairo as the foci of the Nahda (Arab renaissance), it draws attention to the agency of Ottoman-Iraqi intellectuals to place themselves within ongoing discussions and to initiate their own, linking them to these better established cultural centers. Moreover, I trace the significant transregional cultural trends that affect intellectual thought, thereby pointing to the linkages from outside and to outside the Ottoman Empire. I consider communications between intellectuals and the imagined communities of the press networks, and investigate conversations around the Arabic language, literary histories and narrative stasis, innovations in literary forms, and the relationship between political regionalism and geographic writing. I am now revising this dissertation for publication as a manuscript, provisionally titled Eastern Lights: The Arab Renaissance in Iraq. This book project is the first full-length study in English to cover the Iraqi Nahda.
Articles
My interest in language–not only what is written in the language but what is the language (were there choices for shaping and modernizing language?)–drives a lot of my research. I have been part of a research project hosted by the Neubauer Collegium for Society & Culture at the University of Chicago where the focus is The Quest of Modern Language between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, 1820-1950. We project researchers agree that examining language/s is key to studying the creation of and access to cultural production. I have written an article about language/s in Northern Iraq during the late-Ottoman period, concerning the rise of the press. I am currently tracing the spirit of the Nahda across Arabic dialects, (and in Ottoman Turkish!), across different scripts, and across religious communities in Iraq. My questions stem from the notion of modernizing, vernacularizing, and narrativizing modern Arabic in Baghdad during the late Ottoman Empire, a plurilingual space.
At the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, my project investigated the overlapping loyalties and identities of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Iraqi Jewish community in relative times of peace and crisis. How, when, and in what ways did this community demonstrate their Ottoman-ness? How, when, and in what ways did this community demonstrate their Jewishness? Answering these questions attempts to sketch out how a non-dominant community practiced imperial citizenship while participating in a religious international diaspora. I am co-authoring an article about David Marshall, the First Minister of Singapore, born in Baghdad in this Jewish community.
One major source for this project is the first newspaper in Baghdad, Ha-Dover (1863-1871). It was printed in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic for the Jewish community. However, I place this newspaper within an wider Ottoman context, viewing the Jewish community as both imperially Ottoman and regionally Iraqi. The articles in the newspaper reveal how Iraqi Jews envisioned themselves to be part of not only Jewish Baghdad, but also modernizing civic Baghdad. Reports about Ottoman reforms, foreign (European) news, and Talmudic debates make eclectic reading material, curated for new possible civic participants of the modern Ottoman state.
I have published articles with the Journal of Jewish Identities, the Journal of Iraq & and Contemporary Arab World Studies, and Hebrew Higher Education about Ottoman, Iraqi, Arabic-language, and Mizrahi cultural and intellectual production. I have several forthcoming book chapters in edited volumes and articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Next project
My second book project is about the first newspaper of Iraq, Ha-Dover, which happens to be in the Hebrew script. While by Jews and for Jews, I analyze it in the Ottoman imperial context that produced it, the Persian Gulf/Indian Ocean World of its consumers, as well as the shaky harmony of secular form (newspaper) and Jewish content that reveals the quotidian quirks of modernization in 1860s Baghdad.
Dr. Annie Greene 