Fung Fellows Public Talk: Making Metropoles in Modern Empires: Core-Periphery Boundary Formation and Its Legacies

Jonathan Wyrtzen

Professor of Sociology and History

Yale University

Jonathan Wyrtzen is Professor of Sociology and History at Yale University. His research engages a set of related thematic areas that include empire and colonialism, state formation and non-state forms of political organization, ethnicity and nationalism, and religion and socio-political action in North Africa and the Middle East and elsewhere. He has published two award-winning books, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Cornell, 2015) and Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (Columbia, 2022). He has three current research streams. One focuses on how and why a spatially and symbolically differentiated “metropole” emerges in phases of imperial expansion (and contraction), using the United State and France in the long 19^th century as key comparative cases. The second, tentatively titled Not Alone Star: Five Hundred Years of Global Texas History, traces the entangled international history of Texas from the first contact of indigenous communities with the Moroccan, Mustapha “Estevanico” Azzemouri, and the other shipwrecked survivors of the Spanish Narvaez expedition near Galveston in 1528 up to the present. The third stream centers on colonial forces deployed across Asia and Africa during the thirty-years decolonization war period in the mid-20th century (1945-75).