Alex Boodrookas

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Alex Boodrookas

Assistant Professor of History

History

Office Hours

In-person drop-in hours:
Tuesday and Thursday, 11-12:15 and 2-3 pm

If you would like to meet outside of office hours, please just send me an email and we can set up an appointment to meet either in-person or on Teams. Students are encouraged to meet with me at any time.

Biography

Junior Research Fellow, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, 2020-2021

Ph.D., NYU, Departments of History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, 2020

M.A., NYU, Department of Near Eastern Studies, 2014

Research Interests

    Field
    Modern Middle East | Twentieth Century | Persian Gulf

    Areas of Interest
    Labor | Migration | Citizenship | Decolonization | Economic History


    I am currently working on a book about labor, citizenship, and political protest in the twentieth-century Persian Gulf, with a focus on Kuwait. Today, the majority of people living in the Gulf states are noncitizens who face harsh working and living conditions, and who have little or no chance of ever gaining nationality. The regional economy therefore depends on an enormous number of systematically disenfranchised and disempowered noncitizen workers. My work tries to understand how and why that came to be, and how the labor movement, pro-democracy activists, anticolonial organizers, and others tried to create a more just social and political order. I hope that the book will shed light on questions of immigration, citizenship, popular protest, and decolonization that extend beyond the confines of the Gulf.

    I have also written, or am writing, about land law, research libraries, and the reconfiguration of trade in the Indian Ocean, which (I promise) are more interesting subjects than they may sound like at first.


    Peer-Reviewed Academic Publications

    Comrades Estranged: Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf. Stanford University Press, 2026

    “Total Literature and Total War: Foreign Aid, Area Studies, and the Weaponization of U.S. Research Libraries.” Diplomatic History 43, No. 2 (2019): 332–352.

    “The Forever Frontier of Urbanism: Historicizing Gulf Cities.” With Arang Keshavarzian. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43, No. 1 (2019): 14-29.
    Updated and republished as “Giving the Transnational a History: Gulf Cities across Time and Space.” (with Arang Keshavarzian). In The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress, Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini ed. New York: NYU Press, 2019.
    Translated and republished in Persian as “مرزهای جاودانه توسعه شهری:تاریخی کردن شهرهای خلیج فارس.” Goftagu [Conversation] No. 92 (خرداد 1401).


    Other Articles

    “Reconceptualizing Noncitizen Labor Rights in the Persian Gulf.” Brandeis Middle East Brief 143, July 2021.

    “Crackdowns and Coalitions in Kuwait.” Middle East Report Online (MERO), June 18th, 2018.
    Translated and republished in French as “Koweït: coalitions inédites et durcissement de la repression,” Alternatives Sud 25, no. 4 (2018): 51-58.


    Selected Awards

    Honorable Mention, Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award | December 2021
    Middle Eastern Studies Association | Social Sciences

    Honorable Mention, Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award | November 2021
    Association of Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS)

    Outstanding Dissertation Award | February 2021
    New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Teaching Interests

    I teach history because it tells us how people in the past shaped the present, and therefore suggests how our own actions can shape the future. In my teaching, I emphasize on social history, or "history from below." Instead of focusing on leaders or battles, I try to show how ordinary people and mass popular movements have, in the past few centuries, transformed global politics, the economy, everyday life, and ideas of justice, equality, and morality. In the end, real historical change means changing the way that people live their lives and think about themselves.

    My objectives vary a bit between courses. When I teach World History, I want students to walk away from the course with a better understanding of how the world works, why the world works the way it does, and how people have, and therefore still can, change it. In my Modern Middle East and History of Islam courses, we focus on questions of representation, as stereotypes and misunderstandings of both of these categories have had a powerful impact on history. But some themes connect all of my courses. I encourage students to draw connections between what we study in class and their everyday lives. I emphasize important movements or events that are often neglected in popular histories. And I try and give students the chance to hone writing and critical thinking skills, which are invaluable not just for writing history, but in life.


    Courses Taught

    World History from 1500 (lower division)
    World of Islam (lower division)
    Modern Middle East (upper division), usually in the spring
    Senior Seminar (upper division)

Education

PhD in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies

New York University

MA in Near Eastern Studies

New York University

BA in History, American Studies

George Washington University

Published Works