Publications

Books

Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (University of California Press, 2020).

The Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East—as an idea—was made by coal. Coal’s imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil that wreaks carnage today, as carbonization threatens our very climate. Powering Empire argues that we cannot promote worldwide decarbonization without first understanding the history of the globalization of carbon energy. How did this black rock come to have such long-lasting power over the world economy?

On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2013).

In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time.

Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (Uppsala University Press, 2006).

Names Without Faces is based on an empirical study of the nicknaming practices prevalent in the Islamic chat-room of the Yahoo provider in the months following September 11, 2001. Viewing these nicknames as the primary marker for the surfer’s virtual identity, this essay explores their importance in a range of activities, from religious and political polemics to flirtation and partner-seeking. The study shows that in choosing nicknames, members of this virtual Islamic community were inspired not only by the norms and language governing the digital world but also by the rich reservoir of names and naming practices prevalent in Islamic cultures. As in the offline world, chat-room naming emerges as an elementary social activity illuminating the nature of the various links between the individual and the group. This essay creatively uses names as a tool for doing internet ethnography and for engaging with conceptual questions regarding the hybrid manifestation of religion on the web. Names also provide a useful context for understanding phenomena like the Islamic chat-room and other manifestations of digital Islam as parts of a dynamic and constantly shifting tradition.

Journal of Levantine Studies, Volume 10 No. 1, Summer 2020.

The collected articles in this volume join what is rapidly emerging as a dynamic and increasingly crowded field in Middle East studies. In this field methodological nationalisms — whose practitioners consider the state to be an exclusive unit of analysis — are out, and global perspectives on Middle Eastern history are in.