This work traces the development of Russian national consciousness from the time of the reforms of Peter the Great in the early-18th century, when ideas of nation and nationalism first penetrated Russia, up until Russia's current post-imperial identity crisis. It looks at nation…
In the last 30 years, Iran has experienced mounting environmental problems, such as air and water pollution, that are perceived as in need of redress. In order to address and confront these problems, Iran has recently adopted the language and framework of ecological science. Sub…
This study offers a critical examination of the breakdown of a state and its consequences for the rise of Somaliland, Puntland and other autonomous regional states and the failure to establish a centralized state in Somalia for the last twenty years. Focusing on the events that …
Pledging Transnational Allegiances: Nationhood, Selfhood, and Belonging in Asian American and Jewish American Narratives, represents a comparative study of immigrant fiction that traces its development over the course of the twentieth century. The use of Jewish American and Asia…
Despite Geoffrey Chaucer's longstanding reputation as the English nation's first writer, his relation to the problem of nationhood has just begun to receive extensive critical attention. This dissertation clarifies the nature of Chaucer's national imagination by drawing on recen…
The City and the Word examines how early modern writers depicted London in the guise of various iterations of Jerusalem and thereby shaped their readers as subjects of a uniquely privileged nation. I argue that discursive parallels between these two capital cities contributed to…
This dissertation is an historical ethnography that examines how north Indian Muslim families came to be divided between India and Pakistan, to become Indian Muslims on one side and muhajirs on the other. I argue here that these families came to be divided not simply because mem…
This dissertation examines the construction of the label Muslim as an emerging racial and political signifier. I explore how students who identify as Muslim understand their own racial and religious construction, as well as their own subjectivity within the American social, poli…