Sahar Bostock, Postdoctoral Associate, Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, will present the next Agrarian Studies paper of the Spring 2026 semester. For these seminars, participants send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium. Meetings are held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101, on Fridays 11am–1pm Eastern.
Please contact agrarian.studies@yale.edu to receive the meeting information and the password to download the paper from the Agrarian Studies website.
Sahar Bostock is a historian of science, technology, and the environment in the modern Middle East, specializing in the history of Palestine/Israel. She received her PhD in History from Columbia University and is currently a Postdoctoral Associate with the Program in Agrarian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Her research explores how urban planning, transportation networks, and agricultural schemes shaped everyday life in the desert and mediated interactions between Ottoman and British imperial actors; Palestinian Bedouin, fellahin, and urbanites; and Zionist settlers. Her current book project, Desert Developmentalism, examines how infrastructural and agricultural initiatives—and their disintegration and destruction—transformed both material landscapes and colonial politics in Southern Palestine over the century leading to Israeli independence and Palestinian statelessness. Drawing on archival, published, and visual sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, and English, alongside interviews with members of Bedouin communities, her work demonstrates how shifting ideas about deserts and desert-dwellers interacted with material infrastructure to reshape the environment, its people, and its imagined futures. Sahar’s doctoral research was supported by the Social Science Research Council and Zeit Stiftung Bucerius.