About

Arbella Bet-Shlimon is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Washington, with a focus on the modern Middle East. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2012, her M.A. from the University of Michigan in 2006, and her B.A. from the University of Washington in 2003. Her scholarship explores how cities, borderlands, and resources shape political identities and practices within the context of empire, colonialism, and state formation, particularly in Iraq and the Gulf region. Her first book, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk, examines how oil and urban development contributed to ethnic polarization and segregation in Kirkuk under British colonialism and Iraqi state policies. Her research critically engages with concepts such as ethnicity, nation, crisis, intercommunal violence, and mass atrocity, with a particular interest in how these phenomena are articulated in regions affected by imperial relationships and resource extraction. Bet-Shlimon’s work is informed by her personal experiences as an Assyrian, and she actively supports Assyrian/Syriac history and related academic and public initiatives. She has been recognized for her teaching with the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award and has contributed to advancing understanding of Middle Eastern history through her publications, teaching, and public engagement.

Research topics

• History
• Political science
• Ancient history
• Art
• Geography

Selected publications

• “Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies

  Review of Middle East Studies · 2026-04-21

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  Abstract Atrocity denial suffuses the bedrock of the academic field of modern Middle East studies. One of the most frequently cited works about modern Assyrians is a 1974 revisionist account of the 1933 massacres of Assyrians in Iraq. Its author, Khaldun S. Husry, dismisses Assyrian recollections of the violence as “propaganda of the victims.” Examining how Husry’s article came to be published reveals that the editor who published it, Stanford Shaw, promoted its logic as part of his denial of the Armenian genocide. As a result of the influence of this denialism, Assyrians—who continue to face displacement and dispossession over a century after hundreds of thousands of them, alongside Armenians, were killed by the Ottoman Empire—are systematically demeaned in academic literature. Scholars routinely treat Assyrians as problematic, questioning their legitimacy through racist lines of inquiry. They then claim, as moral licensing for their contempt, that their aim is to critique ethnic nationalism and colonialism. Analyzing the disparagement of Assyrians in the Middle East studies field offers lessons about what good and bad critiques of ethnic nationalism look like, how to avoid historiographical and citational pitfalls when writing about marginalized people, and why revisionist histories of atrocities are profoundly harmful.

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• Kirkuk as a crucible: Sargon Boulus and the question of pluralism in northern Iraq

  Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World · 2020-06-01

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  In the conclusion to this collection, I critically examine the theme of pluralism through the legacy of the poet Sargon Boulus (1944–2007), Kirkuk’s most famous writer. Boulus once described Kirkuk’s culture as a ‘crucible’ whose vernacular multilingualism made him into a writer. If Iraqis see Kirkuk as a microcosm of Iraq’s diversity, Boulus is most often claimed as a human exemplar of the value of that pluralism. Yet, there are competing versions of his legacy that lead to incompatible readings of his work. Boulus’s own words reveal that he was less interested in diversity, heterogeneity or ethnicity than he was in developing layered understandings of literature and land. His literary project was not nostalgic and did not elide differences. Ultimately, northern Iraq’s history of conflict amid pluralism must be reclaimed and explicitly reckoned with in order to understand the extreme divisions and homogenization of communities and territories facing Iraq today.

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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• City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk

  2019-05-21 · 5 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
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• City of Black Gold

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2019-01-01 · 61 citations

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  Kirkuk is Iraq's most multilingual city, for millennia home to a diverse population. It was also where, in 1927, a foreign company first struck oil in Iraq. Over the following decades, Kirkuk became the heart of Iraq's booming petroleum industry. City of Black Gold tells a story of oil, urbanization, and colonialism in Kirkuk—and how these factors shaped the identities of Kirkuk's citizens, forming the foundation of an ethnic conflict. Arbella Bet-Shlimon reconstructs the twentieth-century history of Kirkuk to question the assumptions about the past underpinning today's ethnic divisions. In the early 1920s, when the Iraqi state was formed under British administration, group identities in Kirkuk were fluid. But as the oil industry fostered colonial power and Baghdad's influence over Kirkuk, intercommunal violence and competing claims to the city's history took hold. The ethnicities of Kurds, Turkmens, and Arabs in Kirkuk were formed throughout a century of urban development, interactions between communities, and political mobilization. Ultimately, this book shows how contentious politics in disputed areas are not primordial traits of those regions, but are a modern phenomenon tightly bound to the society and economics of urban life.

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• State–Society Relations in the Urban Spheres of Baghdad and Kirkuk, 1920–58

  I.B.Tauris eBooks · 2017-01-01 · 1 citations

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• Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012). Pp. 328. $80.00 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book.

  International Journal Middle East Studies · 2015-02-01

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  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• Sherko Kirmanj. Identity and Nation in Iraq. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013. xviii + 258 pages, appendixes, acronyms, glossary, references, index. Cloth US$65.00 ISBN 978-1-58826-885-3.

  Review of Middle East Studies · 2014-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Sherko Kirmanj. Identity and Nation in Iraq. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013. xviii + 258 pages, appendixes, acronyms, glossary, references, index. Cloth US$65.00 ISBN 978-1-58826-885-3. - Volume 48 Issue 1-2

  PublisherDOI

• The Politics and Ideology of Urban Development in Iraq’s Oil City

  Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East · 2013-04-25 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Bet-Shlimon’s article considers the question of how, in the urban arena of Kirkuk, oil acted as a catalyst for development projects in which political, economic, and ideological threads were inextricably intertwined. It contends that the presence of oil in Kirkuk created certain factors that shaped both the trajectory of urban development and its political implications. One of these factors was the presence of many foreign, especially British, workers and executives of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). The company’s size also meant that a large number of the city’s residents worked for this foreign-owned enterprise, leading to labor organization and interventions by the company in order to promote capitalist ideals. Second, the fact that the oil industry had greater access to resources and materials than the Kirkuk municipality allowed the IPC to spearhead housing, water, and other infrastructural projects. Finally, as the site where Iraq’s oil wealth was produced, Kirkuk was of vital importance to the Iraqi and British governments, both of whom pressured the IPC to act in ways that would benefit their interests. Throughout these projects and the interactions that accompanied them, the IPC, British government, and Iraqi government operated on the assumption that urban development could counter the influence of communism and lead to the attainment of modernity.

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• Group Identities, Oil, and the Local Political Domain in Kirkuk

  Journal of Urban History · 2012-07-05 · 14 citations

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  Using materials from British government and oil company archives, as well as magazine articles, newspaper articles, and other published sources in English and Arabic, this article addresses the group identities of the ethnic communities of Kirkuk, Iraq, in the context of the city’s growth as a result of the presence of the Iraqi oil industry. It contends that in the early to mid-twentieth century, Kirkuk developed a distinct domain of urban politics in which previously fluid ethnic identities hardened and in which Kirkukis, at one time more reliant on external patronage, became deeply invested. These circumstances led to intercommunal tensions and violence in the city in Iraq’s post-1958 revolutionary era.

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Education

• Ph.D., History and Middle Eastern Studies

  Harvard University

  2012

• MA, Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  2006

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Washington (2017…
• Best U.S. Dissertation on Modern or Medieval Iraq, The Acade…