Doctoral Student Fellow
PhD Candidate, Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Graduate School of Arts & Science
Project: Borders in Disrepair: Archival Excavations and Present Crisis at the Hinges of the Mediterranean
Maysam Taher is a doctoral candidate in the NYU department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Her dissertation “Borders in Disrepair: Archival Excavations and Present Crises at the Hinges of the Mediterranean” takes a treaty of colonial reparations signed by Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi in 2008 as a point of departure to examine how such a document came to perform a dual contradictory function: that of compensating Libya for colonial crimes committed by Italy between 1911 and 1947 through $5 billion in infrastructural investments, and that of formalizing an extraterritorial infrastructure of European border policing located in Libya. Her project restages the binational efforts in research and historiography that articulated the claim for reparations in order to demonstrate how colonial archives, their postcolonial rearrangements, and their counter-archival off-shoots are themselves institutions of border-making and unmaking, with material effects that can shape the present and open up multiple futures. Maysam was a 2017-2018 Graduate Fellow in Urban Practice at NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab and a recipient of the 2018 Robert Holmes Travel/Research Award for African Scholarship. She is a current contributing editor at The New Inquiry.