Biography

Kristen Alff is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History, specializing in the history of the Middle East and North Africa, Ottoman and Islamic Worlds, and Business and Political Economy of the Global South. 

Kristen is currently working on her first book, Capitalism around the Mediterranean: Levantine Companies and Landed Property, 1850-1925, which traces the business activies of joint-stock companies which led to the commodification of land in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Levant. Kristen Alff finds that the dire food shortages and Levantine companies' ability to make super-profits during World War I produced major social and economic transformations that were already underway in the region. She also suggests that these transformations and the actors involved in their realization contributed to the shape of capitalism around the Mediterranean basin. An article and book chapter have come out of this research. 

Kristen Alff's second book project takes theoretical inspiration from business history and geology to investigate the plentiful, yet unexplored, resource of bitumen in the Dead Sea, Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula. Dead Sea bitumen is not a glamourous commodity; yet inventors, craftsmen, and industrialists used it in making the first photograph, paint, and shoe leather. It was also mixed with sand to create asphalt used in paving the first roads in the Ottoman Empire -- a place famously lacking in railway transportation. 

Kristen has been awarded honors for her teaching at Stanford Univeristy, and has taught in a variety of university classrooms in Toyko and Egypt. Her first career was as a secondary school English teacher. She uses the lessons she learned as a high school teacher everyday in her classroom and in writing and presenting her own scholarship.