Making History: Archives, Museums, Cities 
A lecture by Rosie Bsheer

The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artefacts that stand witness to them. In this talk, Rosie Bsheer dwells on the practices and politics of history-making by exploring the relationship between archives, museums, the built environment, and structures of power.

This talk is an open-to-all component of the 2023 Night School, a four-week seminar led by Todd Reisz titled Make History.

Rosie Bsheer is Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on oil and empire, social and intellectual movements, urban history, historiography, and the making of the modern Middle East. Rosie’s publications include Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2020) and “A Counterrevolutionary State: Popular Movements and the Making of Saudi Arabia,” Past and Present (2018). She is a board member of the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAME), Associate Producer of the 2007 Oscar-nominated film My Country, My Country, and a co-editor of Jadaliyya E-zine. Rosie received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University (2014) and came to Harvard from Yale University, where she taught for four years.