Description:

Faculty and Grad Student Colloquium:

"Petro-Palestine: Technologies of Partition in a Mandated Land" presented by Shira Pinhas, Northwestern University

Palestine is not commonly recognized as an oil-producing country. Yet under British rule (1918–1948), it emerged as a key hub of distillation, shipment, and automobility within the global petroleum industry. This talk examines how pipelines, the Haifa Refinery, asphalt roads, and motor vehicles linking Palestine with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan simultaneously structured spatial segregation between Palestinians and Jews and laid the infrastructural groundwork for partition. Oil, however, became Palestine’s principal energy source not only through mobility: it also permeated domestic life as the main household fuel. The local and global political economy of oil production and consumption reconfigured hierarchies between women and men, production and reproduction, Palestinians and Jews, and metropoles and colonies.

Shira Pinhas is a Weinberg College Postdoctoral Fellow in the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. She is a historian of the social and material history of Palestine/Israel and the broader Levant region. Her research focuses on understanding how new infrastructures and technologies, along with transnational flows of energy, materials, capital, and labor, shaped political hierarchies and social subjectivities during the twentieth century. Before joining Northwestern, Pinhas was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at Princeton University’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, and a Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She received her PhD from Tel Aviv University in 2023.