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Alda Benjamen
Alda Benjamen is a fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. She has held post-doctoral research positions at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Smithsonian Institution. Her work focuses on issues of minoritization and pluralism, raising questions about memory, home and belonging in multilingual and diasporic communities in the context of rural–urban and global migrations. In particular, she studies the role of Assyrians in Iraqi intellectual, cultural and political history, based on extensive primary research inside the country and that foregrounds the perspective of the Iraqi periphery. She has presented on Iraqi refugees and internally displaced people to the Canadian House of Commons and at Capitol Hill press conferences and has been invited to speak internationally on the destruction of cultural heritage. She has participated in a training workshop on this topic for communities that survived ISIS, in Erbil, Iraq. Her work appears in scholarly and contemporary publications including: The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives (Syracuse University Press, 2016), State and Society in Iraq: Citizenship under Occupation, Dictatorship and Democratization (IB Tauris, 2017) and World Politics Review. She holds a Ph.D. in modern Middle East studies and an in Syriac studies.
Contact: The John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, 101 Independence Avenue SE, Washington, DC 20540, USA.