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DISSERTATION RESEARCH PROJECT
Nora Doaiji is presently working on a dissertation project that is tentatively titled:
Roads of Arabia, Men of the Desert: A Global History of Central Arabia, 1817-1972.
The Arabian Peninsula is crisscrossed by numerous trade and hajj routes (turuq) that, for centuries, have been sites of encounter and networks of exchange between people, places, ideas, and texts. In Roads of Arabia, Men of the Desert, Doaiji utilizes a multi-scalar approach to study the routes of Central Arabia over the late-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. She traces a set of turuq networks and travelers' encounters and their transformation over time that, collectively, reveals a local histories of an understudied region that challenge modernist notions of international development, social transformation, and the desert landscape. Studying Central Arabian routes further offers a unique vantage point to historicize the region through its transnational and transregional dimensions and evidences an interconnected history from the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula to the coasts of California and the ports of Iraq and India.
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DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECT
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Arabian Peninsula Digital Archive
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Nora Doaiji specializes in social and environmental history, the history of travel, mobility, and migration, as well as borderlands and global history, with a focus on the interconnections between the Arabian Peninsula, the United States, and the Indian Ocean and Ottoman Worlds. Her other research interests include social media and disinformation in the Middle East and she has worked extensively on gender, sexuality, nationalism, and social movements in Saudi Arabia.