Wednesday, October 7, 2015
12 p.m.
McKinney Conference Room
Register here. Registration is limited.
Lunches for registered guests will be held until 12:00 noon, then released for those on standby.
Elizabeth Williams is a postdoctoral fellow in international affairs at the Watson Institute. She received her PhD in history from Georgetown University in the summer of 2015. Her research examines the relationship between imperial governance, expertise, and the environment. Focusing on the transition from the late Ottoman Empire to the French Mandate period, she analyzes how agricultural technologies emerging during this period intersected with the development of new strategies of rule and conceptions of expertise. By tracing the movement and activities of global, imperial and local actors in networks involved in the production of knowledge regarding these new technologies and their implementation, she investigates intellectual and practical continuities and divergences in approaches to governance during the late Ottoman and French mandate periods and their impacts on rural communities and environmental management. Her work draws on materials from Ottoman and French archives as well as sources from Lebanon, the national archives of the UK and US, and the UN FAO archives in Rome.