PhD, Society & Environment
PhD, Society & Environment
My research and teaching are situated in the field of Transnational American Studies, with an emphasis on comparative and relational inquiry across Native American/Indigenous Studies, Africana Studies, and Environmental Humanities. Trained as an interdisciplinary historian of agriculture and the environment, my research considers how modes of anticipatory governance in moments of “natural” or “ecological” crisis re-entrench historic entanglements of racialization, colonization, and accumulation.
I carry out my research and writing in both academic and think tank settings. I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University (CHAT) and a Project Policy Analyst with the Global Justice program at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS) at the University of California, Berkeley.
My research has been published in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences and in Comparative American Studies. As a Project Policy Analyst with the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, I have also co-authored reports on agricultural and environmental policy; international development and globalization; and forced migration.
Agricultural and Environmental Policy | International Development |Race, Culture, and U.S. State Power
My first book project is entitled Verdant Empire: Racial Capitalism, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of U.S. Agricultural Development. In it, I investigate the largely obscured connections between the United States’ Cold War-era agricultural and rural development programs—which helped consolidate U.S. state power and transnational capitalism as they aimed to combat hunger and contain civil unrest across the Third World—and the histories of U.S. slavery, settlement, and empire from which they emerged.
— BOOK MANUSCRIPT —
Verdant Empire: Racial Capitalism, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of U.S. Agricultural Development, invited by Duke University Press (Expected submission Fall 2021).
— REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES —
“‘So God Made a Farmer’: The US Agrarian Imaginary and the Lived Assemblages of Settlement and Empire,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, 2019.
— REVIEW ESSAYS —
“Modern Liberalism and its Fictions.” Book review of Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents. Qui Parle, no. 1–2 (2016): 207–20.
— MANUSCRIPTS IN SUBMISSION —
“Post-Plantation Economies of Dispossession: On Blackness and the National Economy,” Social Text (Under review).
“Migration, Containment, and the Cross-Hemispheric 'Souths' of U.S. Slave and Settler Capitalism,” Theory & Event (Under review).
— POLICY ANALYSES AND REPORTS —
Elsheikh, Elsadig and Hossein Ayazi. “Rights Denied: Petro-Persecution and Climate Refugees.” Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, (forthcoming).
Elsheikh, Elsadig and Hossein Ayazi. “The Era of Corporate Consolidation and the End of Competition: Bayer-Monsanto, Dow-DuPont, and ChemChina-Syngenta.” Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, 2018.
Elsheikh, Elsadig and Hossein Ayazi. “Moving Targets: An Analysis of Global Forced Migration.” Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, 2017.
powell, john a., Elsadig Elsheikh, and Hossein Ayazi. “The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Corporations Before People and Democracy.” Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, 2016.
Ayazi, Hossein and Elsadig Elsheikh. “The U.S. Farm Bill: Corporate Power and Structural Racialization in the United States Food System.” Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, 2015.
Laura Bassi Scholarship (Book Manuscript Editorial Assistance), Editing Press, Fall 2018
Arnold Schultz Fellowship for Society and Environment, UC Berkeley, Fall 2017
Graduate Student Travel Grant, Critical Ethnic Studies and Minority Scholars Committees, American Studies Association, Fall 2017
UC Consortium for Black Studies in California Research Grant, Spring 2016
ESPM Summer Research Grant, UC Berkeley, Summer 2015
Mentored Research Award, UC Berkeley, 2015–2016
Graduate Division Summer Research Grant, UC Berkeley, Summer 2014
Center for Race and Gender Research Grant, UC Berkeley, Fall 2013
Graduate Division Summer Research Grant, UC Berkeley, Summer 2013
Associated Students Academic Opportunities Fund Grant, UC Berkeley, Summer 2013
Phi Beta Kappa, UC San Diego, 2010
Provost’s Honors, UC San Diego, 2007 – 2009
UC Berkeley, ESPM, Graduate Student Instructor, ESPM 160AC: “American Environmental and Cultural History,” Fall 2014
UC Berkeley, History, Reader, HISTORY 127AC: “California History,” Spring 2014
UC Berkeley, ESPM, Graduate Student Instructor, ESPM 155: “Sociology and Political Ecology of Agro-Food Systems,” Fall 2013
UC Berkeley, ESPM, Graduate Student Instructor, ESPM 50AC: “Introduction to Culture and Natural Resource Management,” Fall 2012
UC San Diego, Division of Biological Sciences / Division of Anthropology, Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, BIEB 176: “Conservation and the Human Predicament,” Spring 2009
Tufts University, Center for the Humanities, Postdoctoral Fellow, 2018 - 2020
UC Berkeley, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, Project Policy Analyst, Global Justice Program, Summer 2018 - Present
UC Berkeley, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, Research Fellow, Global Justice Program, Spring 2015 - Spring 2018
