Occupation
Assistant Professor
Contact
University of Dayton, Dept of History
300 College Park Ave.
Dayton
OH
45469
United States
ABOUT
Alda Benjamen is the Avimalek Betyousef Faculty Fellow in Assyrian history, and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for the Middle East, at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, she was a Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She has also held post-doctoral research positions at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Smithsonian Institution. Her expertise lies in the twentieth-century intellectual, cultural and political history of Iraq and Syria. Her work focuses on issues of minoritization and pluralism, raising questions about memory, home, and belonging in multilingual and diasporic communities in the context of rural-to-urban and global migrations. She obtained her PhD in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Master’s degree in Syriac Studies from the University of Toronto’s Near and Middle Eastern Studies Department.
Her book, Assyrians in Modern Iraq: Negotiating Political and Cultural Space (Cambridge UP, Dec 2021), is a monograph on twentieth-century Iraqi intellectual history based on extensive primary research inside the country. It focuses on the perspective of the Iraqi periphery and the history of bilingualism, challenging the monolingual narrative of the state, examining the relationship between the strengthened Iraqi state under the Ba'th regime and Assyrians. Drawing upon oral and ethnographic sources and archival documents, in both Arabic and modern Aramaic, uncovered at the Iraqi National Archives in Baghdad, as well as libraries and private collections in the north, it explores the role of minorities in Iraq’s intellectual and mostly leftist oppositional movements in the late twentieth century.
Discipline
History
Sub Areas
19th-21st Centuries
Arab Studies
Assyrian Studies
Cultural Studies
Diaspora/Refugee Studies
Folklore/Folklife
Gender/Women's Studies
Identity/Representation
Kurdish Studies
Middle East/Near East Studies
Minorities
Nationalism
Pop Culture
Transnationalism
Geographic Areas of Interest
All Middle East
Assyria
Iraq
Syria
Specialties
Iraqi Studies
Modern Middle East
Women And Gender
Languages
Arabic (fluent)
Assyrian (native)
French (intermediate)
Syriac (advanced)
Education
DPhil
| 2015
| History
| University of Maryland, College Park
MA
| 2008
| Near and Middle Eastern Studies Civilization
| University of Toronto
BE
| 2005
| Ontario Institute for Studies In Education
| University of Toronto
BS
| 2004
| Applied Sci
| York U
Abstracts
\'Songs of Defiance\': Oral History through Music
Contextualizing Assyrians in Iraq's History
Ba’thist “Generosity” and The Assyrian Literary Movement
Assyrians in Ba'thist Iraq: From "National Minority" to "Religious Denomination."
Between Negotiation and Resistance: Assyrian Press and Popular Culture in the 1970s
