Nada Khalifa
Department of History
Nada Khalifa is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, where she specializes in the political and intellectual history of the modern Middle East. Her dissertation, “After the Fact: Social Investigation and Constitutionalism in Egypt and Bilād al-Shām, 1908-1923,” puts forward a new interpretation of the interplay between projects of imperial expansion and movements for self-determination in Egypt and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire from the Young Turk Revolution through to the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne. Based on documentary repositories assembled by a number of investigative bodies, among them government inspectorates, commissions of inquiry and social scientific expeditions, the dissertation explores how Ottoman, British, French and American experts, intellectuals and activists navigated a transitional conjuncture marked by the collapse of longstanding structures of political and social authority. It argues that the influential proposals for constitutional and administrative reform advanced during this period were conditioned by competing imperial systems of information-gathering constructed to contain the effects of war and revolution. In dialogue with the literature on Wilsonianism, on peace-making after the Great War and on the mandates system in the Middle East, the project integrates international and imperial history with regional processes of self-reckoning and identity formation through an examination of investigative writing and its production.
Nada received her B.A. (2014) and M.A. (2016) from the University of Toronto before continuing her studies at Columbia. Her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
