Project: Decentering Empire: Sections of Imperialism in the Borderlands of the Hittite Empire

Project Statement: I will be using the CHAT Fellowship to continue work on my first book, Decentering Empire: Sections of Imperialism in the Borderlands of the Hittite Empire. My project offers a new understanding of the Hittite Empire as a flexible apparatus that operated differently in its various border zones. Using the metaphor of the architectural technique of drawing sections to reveal different aspects of a structure and its relating topography, my book takes a series of spatial and temporal cuts across the Hittite Empire to demonstrate the diversity deliberately incorporated into the Hittite imperial system. Through temporal cuts, I trace the trajectories of different border regions in the longue durée and argue that Hittite imperial strategies were tailored to the pre-Hittite histories of each region. Through a synchronic cut across the empire in its final century, I compare these various forms of imperialism side by side to exhibit the range of possibilities for being Hittite in Late Bronze Age Anatolia. My book aims to complement the dominant perspective in Hittite studies, which emphasizes the agency of the central region, by employing a bottom-up approach to the borderlands to understand imperial systems.
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Project: Lineage: Religious Culture and the (Re)Makings of Ethnic Identity in the African Diaspora

Project Statement: As a CHAT Fellow I will be advancing my book manuscript that examines the role of religious culture in the shaping of new ethnic identities formed in the African diaspora as a result of the trans-Atlantic trade. During my ethnographic research in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas over the last several years, I have documented how shared religious culture can be utilized as a methodology to understand the motives and processes of social reorganization among enslaved Africans in the North American context and thereafter. For many African diasporic groups, ritual practice, memory, and tradition has been a dominant theme in maintaining collective identity or forging new relationships although understudied because of imposed modern racial or national identity formations as primary. I consider the socio-cultural impact of forced migration on hundreds of people groups from West Africa asking what shared aspect of their ethos did groups in diaspora most utilize as an organizing principle to reconstruct collective identity and culture?

Lineage proposes that shared religious culture was used as the foundation for social cohesion, ethics, recognizable social status, community leadership, and survival among other things within enslaved communities. African ethnic groups we know as the Yoruba, Wolof, Ewe, and Akan, were able to negotiate and reconstruct new ethnic groups and cultural continuums that in modern times we recognize as African American, Jamaican, or Haitian, for example. The significance of ethnic identity in the modern African diaspora is reconsidered here because having an ethnic identity in traditional life was central to knowing what religious rituals a group should practice to maintain their existence on earth and in the afterlife. This thesis is unique in considering that ethnic identity continues to be an important source of collective identity and motivation in the African diaspora as it has been on the continent, and it is not comprehensively understood through modern nation state boundaries or racial categorization. My work hopes to offer a new paradigm of study for the humanities and social sciences that moves beyond modern categories of race, gender, and class as the primary ways to process human behavior and identity. This research extracts a comprehensive analysis of history, culture, and collective identity by utilizing ethnicity and religion as the primary categories of epistemological reasoning.
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Project: Autonomous Defense: How Tech Companies are Crafting and Cashing in on the Future of Warfare

Project Statement: As a CHAT fellow, I will work on a book project about US-based technology defense companies, particularly those specializing in autonomous software and systems. This book offers a compelling, behind-the-scenes narrative, drawing from computational and content analyses of these companies’ patents, policy documents, white papers, interviews, contracts, financial records, and government solicitations. The narrative focuses on how Silicon Valley companies navigate national defense projects proposed and contracted by organizations like the US Department of Defense. The central argument is that a new breed of tech companies is emerging that employs aggressive and entrepreneurial tactics to bolster AI defense. Unlike old-guard defense contractors, they pitch products to customers like defense and security agencies rather than solely vying for contracts. This emergence, in turn, is examined in the book as the latest iteration of war profiteering, where companies further exploit the defense sector for financial gain.
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Project: This Land is My Land: Property, Paramilitarism, and the American Dream

Project Statement: My research examines the role of law in conflict and peacemaking, with a particular focus on property. During the CHAT fellowship, I will be working on a new book project on the relationship between property and paramilitarism in the United States. The project pairs ethnographic work with archival research on the historical framing and circulation of paramilitary interpretations of property. By focusing its inquiry into the relationship between property and paramilitarism over time, the project offers insights into how paramilitarism has contributed to shaping mainstream American legal practices and cultural life, and more broadly, the mechanisms by which violence can become embedded in legal disputes, doctrines, and practices. As a CHAT fellow, I will conduct ethnographic and archival research as well as early stage writing for this project.
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Project: Gehlen’s Philosophy of Second Nature: Culture as Self-Formation

Project Statement: My dissertation offers an original interpretation and explication of the primary works of the 20th century German philosopher Arnold Gehlen, especially insofar as he deals with questions regarding nature, culture, and hermeneutics. My primary claim is that Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology defends the view that humans are self-forming beings which form themselves via their own practical and interpretive activity. This is a view where the “nature” of human beings is conceptualized always in relation to “second nature,” i.e., the various productions and forms of sensemaking that make up human culture. Gehlen is distinctive amongst philosophers of second nature in that he attempts to specify some of the “first natural” biological pre-conditions of self-formation (specifically via the notion of the “deficient being”), encouraging a blending and balancing of naturalistic and hermeneutic approaches to the human. I use Gehlen’s approach to reconsider questions about the historical diversity of self-formation, the possibility of a liberal naturalism, the conceptual autonomy of the human sciences, and the relation between philosophy and anthropology.
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Project: Negotiating (Non)Belonging: Queer Visibility and Community Access in Urban India

Project Statement: As a CHAT graduate fellow, I will be completing my dissertation, Negotiating (Non)Belonging: Queer Visibility and Community Access in Urban India. This project draws from ethnographic research conducted among queer social spaces, community events, and a digital media advocacy organization based in Mumbai, India. As recent contexts of legal recognition and rising queer visibility in India support an emerging scene of queer urban social spaces, individuals face new opportunities to come out and participate in designated spaces of community. As individuals engage with such community networks in pursuit of social support, they negotiate how their identities relate to emergent class/caste-based standards of cosmopolitan queer sociality and self-expression. Centering the experiences of young adult, upper and middle-class queer people living in Mumbai, this project analyzes how the dynamics of neoliberal urbanism, transnational funding conditions, and digital media cultures influence access and belonging to queer social spaces. In doing so, it seeks to reveal the class and caste stratified terms of social acceptance for queer subjects in urban India produced at the intersections of privatized neoliberal queer politics, transnational digital media cultures, and state projects of ethnoreligious Hindu nationalism.
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