Description
- Abstract:
- “Classrooms Abroad” examines the distinctive role of education in shaping relationships between Americans and the peoples of the (post-)Ottoman Middle East in the early part of the twentieth century. It contends that the decades leading up to World War II have much to teach students of U.S. empire and U.S.-Middle Eastern history about the mechanisms, consequences and limitations of American liberal capitalism’s expansion into the region and argues that education, understood as including both teaching and research activities, functioned as a key site and process in facilitating an expanding American imperial imagination vis-à-vis the region. While my analysis illuminates American liberal capital’s success in instrumentalizing education as a means to expand into the eastern Mediterranean region during this period, I also consider various Ottoman groups’ equal investment in education as a means to achieve their own political, economic and cultural ends. “Classrooms Abroad” is organized around two institutional case studies: Robert College, an American men’s college founded in Istanbul in 1863, and the archaeological work of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which commenced with the Institute’s founding survey expedition in 1919-1920 and continued with multiple excavations across the region through the 1920s and 1930s. Mobilizing a visual historical approach to the study of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations documented in these institutional archives, my analysis demonstrates the simultaneity of Ottoman-Middle Eastern and American desires for social, political and economic transformation in the region through education. By highlighting the civil relations and forms of political imagination preserved within the photographic record, my dissertation strives to reconfigure the social imaginaries preserved within archives of American transnational education, using them to both reconstruct the possibilities for social and political relations across national borders in the past and to imagine new forms of U.S.-Middle Eastern sociality in the future.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- All rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.
Citation
Wolfson, Elizabeth Kay,
"Classrooms Abroad: Gender, race, education, and transnational social worlds between the U.S. and the Middle East"
(2019).
American Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/h2bk-mf80
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Collection:
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American Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the American Studies department....