Shira Pinhas
Weinberg College Postdoctoral Fellow in the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies
- shira.pinhas@northwestern.edu
- Crowe Hall, 5-167
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.
Her current book project, titled Petro-Palestine: Energy Infrastructures of Empire and Nation, traces how the construction of oil infrastructures – the Kirkuk-Haifa-Tripoli pipelines, the Haifa refinery, asphalt-roads, and the cars that traveled on them – dramatically reconfigured the Zionist-Palestinian struggle for control of the land. It demonstrates how these infrastructures, which both physically and socially connected Palestine to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan, also created spatial segregation between Arabs and Jews and laid the groundwork for the plan to partition Palestine. The book is based on her dissertation (Tel Aviv University, 2023), which was awarded the Best Dissertation Award by The Middle East & Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI).
Her second book project, titled Crafting Conflict: Technologies of Militarization in the Interwar Middle East, explores how late-imperial economic development co-constituted the emergence of a growing arms industry in the Middle East. It examines how industrial development, particularly concessions granted by the British government, facilitated—and how their growth was enhanced by—the manufacture and trafficking of arms.
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. Before her graduate studies, she spent a decade as a community organizer in Palestinian-Jewish NGOs promoting social change.
Selected Publications:
“The Gender of Fossil Fuels: Oil and Domestic Perils in Mandate Palestine,” Gender & History, advanced online publication, 26 February 2025.
“Road, Map: Partition in Palestine from the Local to the Transnational,” Journal of Levantine Studies 10, no. 1 (Summer 2020): 111-21.