Assistant professor @UChicagoHistory and @UChicagoCEGU. "Egypt's Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism," out with @stanfordpress.
1 subscribed
Aug 28, 2023 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Thread: I've been wanting to write about what is happening to Cairo since I returned from a brief research trip in July. This piece draws attention to some of the changes but significantly underplays the stakes and intensity of so much destruction.
nytimes.com/2023/08/26/wor…2/ To begin, it's unfortunate that this article frames the story as one of "modernization" and its casualties. Given the excellent quality of Vivian Yee's reporting, I suspect this may be the editorial imposition of the Times's penchant for both-sidesism.
Dec 7, 2022 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
As someone who cares very deeply about the institution where I started my career and worked for seven years, I am furious at how the New School administration is handling the strike by my former colleagues and friends in @UAW7902 at @EugeneLang and @NSSRNews.
One thing that has become increasingly apparent--and alarming--is the degree to which the top administrators signing the emails that go out to the whole university community fail to grasp the damage that their ongoing, calculated misrepresentations of the strike are doing.
Nov 15, 2021 • 29 tweets • 8 min read
Last Friday 11/12, we finished the semester's amazing lineup of sessions in the @EmpireCurrency Sawyer Seminar with a spectacular panel featuring @nelsonhbarbosa, @DavidNdii and @ksjomo. As has been each week since Utsa Patnaik's fantastic opening keynote, I learned a great deal.
Recordings from our earlier sessions can be found on our website, linked below. While we work on posting the video from this final meeting of the fall semester, I wanted to share some of the highlights that have kept my head buzzing since Friday. currencyandempire.org/event-recordin…
Sep 30, 2021 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Thread/ This story by @jennyschuessler about @beverlygage's principled resignation from Yale's Grand Strategy program, though already quite damning, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg. nytimes.com/2021/09/30/art…
At its inception in the early 2000s, the Grand Strategy program and its faculty--mainly John Lewis Gaddis and Charles Hill--played a pivotal role in helping the Bush administration build its case for war in Afghanistan and Iraq by lending them an aura of intellectual gravitas.
Sep 28, 2021 • 26 tweets • 5 min read
Thread/ I promised to share the syllabus for my seminar "Peripheries, Frontiers, and Outsides of Historical Capitalism." Here's the reading list by week. The current plan is co-teach a revised and expanded version next spring (2023) with Nancy Fraser, so suggestions are welcome.
A description of the basic premise of the course can be found here: courses.newschool.edu/courses/GHIS52…
Jun 6, 2021 • 21 tweets • 7 min read
Thread: For those who stopped following once the ship was floating again, the troubles of the giant container ship Ever Given did not end on March 29. Here's a rundown of what has happened since. #SuezCanal
Once the behemoth ship was dug free from the banks of the #SuezCanal, Egypt's Suez Canal Authority impounded the ship and detained it in the Great Bitter Lake that lies between the northern and southern stretches of Canal. It has been there ever since. goo.gl/maps/tSbavyLBp…
Mar 26, 2021 • 35 tweets • 6 min read
With the Ever Given wedged in place, bad histories of the #SuezCanal are piling up about as quickly as the container ships in that giant maritime traffic jam. I'm hoping to do some writing on the Canal's history soon, but in the mean time, here are some reading recommendations:
On the Canal as an exemplar of the pattern of predatory international lending that was crucial to the workings of European imperialism in the late nineteenth century and that led directly to British occupation of Egypt, read Ch. 30 of Rosa Luxemburgs "The Accumulation of Capital"
Jul 7, 2020 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
A few thoughts about today's vicious ICE modification to student visas in light of my thread from last week about how the pandemic is accelerating the breakdown of a funding model that conceives of higher ed as a consumer good.
This story in @nytimes, beginning with its headline, fails spectacularly to explain what is happening right now to universities all across this country. The conflicts over plans for the fall are warning signs of an epic crisis for higher ed.
nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/…
Before I explain, a few important caveats. First, @nytimes did recently run an excellent op-ed by my colleague @TenuredRadical that describes well the contours of the disaster that is looming and offers a compelling plan for how to address it.
@chebhocine@forsoothsayer As @chebhocine notes, I deal with this issue at some length in my book, which will not be out until this summer. (Thanks for the plug, Hussein.) I'll be giving a talk along these lines at MESA in New Orleans on Friday evening, so here's a preview of the argument:
@chebhocine@forsoothsayer The central organizing premise of British rule throughout the decades of the occupation was that Egyptians, as racially distinctive human subjects, were capable of no more and no less than a bare recognition of basic material interests.
1 subscribed
