Dr. Sajadian (Ph.D. ’22) and Dr. Glück (Ph.D. ’19) are among 62 scholars selected from a pool of over 2,300 applicants to join the ACLS Fellowship Program, which provides up to $60,000 for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing.

Sajadian, an assistant professor at Vassar College, is turning her doctoral dissertation into the book, Debt and Refuge: Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon. The project analyzes why and how countless numbers of Syrian refugees who have long-standing ties to Lebanon as seasonal farmworkers went into debt throughout the ongoing Syrian conflict. The work makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and a feminist question of social reproduction, as debt at every scale of life governs how people move across borders.

Glück, an assistant professor at American University, is expanding his doctoral dissertation into the book, The Long War on Terror: Decolonization and Recolonization in Kenya. In it, he examines the colonial origins of counterterrorism, arguing that the war on terror is but the most recent articulation of counterrevolutionary projects that have undermined self-determination and liberation movements on the African continent since independence. The book analyzes the politics of counterinsurgency, the shifting terrain of activism in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, and the transformation of the postcolonial state and cities under the auspice of the war on terror. As a historical ethnography of social transformation, the project traces the ways in which social relations, urban spaces, frontier zones, state institutions, and struggles for social justice have been reshaped by the war on terror in Kenya over the past two decades.