Meet the authors of the 68-3 issue, July 2026.
Önder Eren Akgül is a historian of capitalism, political economy, and the environment in the Modern Middle East. He is currently the 2024-2026 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University in 2022. His research specifically examines how global capital articulates itself in imperial political economies, legal and administrative practices, and local economic and ecological life in the Late Ottoman Empire.
Nora Elizabeth Barakat is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches courses on Modern Middle East History, Islamic law, and the history of capitalism. Her scholarship focuses on people, commodities, and landscapes in the interior regions between Palestine and the Persian Gulf in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire, came out with Stanford University Press in 2023. She is working on a new project on the legacies of codified Ottoman civil law in practices of economy-making in the twentieth-century Eastern Mediterranean and northern Persian Gulf regions. Nora completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley, and also taught at Qatar University and NYU Abu Dhabi.
R. Alan Covey is a Professor of Anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2003 and has held appointments at the American Museum of Natural History, Southern Methodist University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Dartmouth College. He has conducted archaeological surveys and excavations in the Andes since 1996, with particular focus on the Cuzco region of highland Peru, where he directed a series of regional settlement pattern surveys near the Inca capital. His archaeological studies includes complementary archival research in Cuzco, Lima, London, and Seville. Working with the material and documentary record, Covey publishes on the origins and expansion of the Inca empire, the European invasion of the Andes, and the sixteenth-century transformation of the Inca heartland through complex negotiations of Spanish colonial rule.
Sam Holley-Kline was most recently an Assistant Clinical Professor in the University Honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) and co-editor (with Allison Mickel) of Histories of Labor in Archaeology, a 2024 special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology. Holley-Kline’s research has appeared in Ethnohistory, the Journal of Social Archaeology, and Archaeological Dialogues, among others, and has been supported by funding from Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Mina Khanlarzadeh is a historian and visiting faculty at Deep Springs College in California. She earned her PhD from Columbia University and previously held postdoctoral appointments at Northwestern University and the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her research spans modern political thought and cultural history, with a focus on translation studies, literary history, gender, and the history of science.
Leo Ramirez is a second-year history PhD student at Duke University with a BA from the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied racialization in Mexico and Peru. His research has examined the intellectual articulation and navigation of racial ideas, with interest in how both elite and racialized individuals positioned themselves and their ideas within their socio-legal and intellectual structures. Through close analyses of figures and texts, he has studied the emergence of indigenismo in Porfirian historiography; race, fear, and belief in Chimalpahin’s Diario; and the racialization and navigation of colonial Afrodescendants beginning with Cusco’s 1582 registro de mulatos.
Alessandro Rippa is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene.” Alessandro has conducted extensive fieldwork along China’s borderlands, and more recently in Italy, and has written on infrastructure development, borders, and human-environment relations, among other topics. He is the author of Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
Yves Winter is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University where he teaches history of political thought and contemporary social and political theory. His research spans critical theory, theories of violence, and international political theory. He is the author of Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence (2018), which received the 2019 First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association as well as the 2020 C. B. Macpherson Prize of the Canadian Political Science Association. He has also published widely on violence, sovereignty, and political order. He is currently completing a book on the social and political imaginary and developing a research project on the afterlives of colonialism.
Alice Yao is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. An anthropological archaeologist, her research examines imperialism in early China, the anthropology of death, and human–environmental interactions. She is the author of The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China (2016) and Archaeology of Han Empire (with Wengcheong Lam, 2025). Bridging the sciences and humanities, her work has been published in American Anthropologist, Antiquity, The Holocene, and PLOS One. She is currently at work researching the intellectual history of lactose.
Emrah Yıldız is a sociocultural anthropologist of cross-border mobility and region formation, and author of the award-winning book Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders (University of California Press, 2024). Editor of “kaçak | qaçax | قاچاق : Fugitive Forms of Bureaucracy and Economy across Southwest Asia” (Journal of Cultural Economy 17(2), 2024) and co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey (JadMag 1, 4, 2014), he works as Associate Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North Africa Studies at Northwestern University. He is currently at work on his second monograph, Outsmarting Sanctions: Experiments with Fictitious Commodities across Iran and Turkey.
