Registrants will receive Zoom videoconference details from the Middle East Policy Forum (mepf@gwu.edu) before the virtual event. Registrants who cannot join the live videoconference will receive a link to the recording.

Tuesday, May 4
11:00am - 12:00pm
ONLINE (Zoom)

Author Bio
Benjamin D. Hopkins is a historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of Afghanistan and British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous books on the region, including The Making of Modern Afghanistan, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, and Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. His new book, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State, presents a global history of how the limits of today’s state-based political order were organized in the late nineteenth century, with lasting effects to the present day. He is currently working on A Concise History of Afghanistan for Cambridge University Press, as well as a manuscript about the continuing war in Afghanistan provisionally entitled, The War that Destroyed America.

Discussant Bio
Dina Rizk Khoury's research and writing spans the early modern and modern history of the Middle East. Her first book, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire, (Cambridge University Press, 1997, 2002), for which she won the Turkish Studies Association and British Society of Middle Eastern Studies awards, explores the relationship between the Ottoman state and group of local power holders and urban gentry on the eastern Iraqi frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. She has also written on the politics of reform and rebellion in eighteenth and nineteenth century Baghdad. Since 2007, she has been researching and writing on war and memory. Her latest book, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom and Remembrance, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), draws on government documents and interviews to argue that war was a form of everyday bureaucratic governance that transformed the manner in which Iraqis made claims to citizenship and expressed notions of selfhood.