I am a scholar, writer, and editor. I received my PhD in History from the University of California, San Diego, in June 2024. My research interests center on the history of the modern Middle East, global histories of planning and development, and the political economy of urban and rural spaces and culture across the Mediterranean. I have written essays and articles for several Arabic and English-language outlets and publications, which can be found at www.zeeadyaghi.com.

Research Project

I am currently developing a book manuscript based on my doctoral research, which focused on state modernization, planning, and development in rural Lebanon during the 1960s. My dissertation, Planning National Disunity: State Modernization and Development in Rural Lebanon, 1958–1970, argues that state planning, aimed at reversing rural flight and revitalizing the rural economy through agricultural development and tourism investment, produced the opposite of its intended outcomes. The Lebanese case parallels modernization and development histories in other postcolonial states, while also revealing the particular attachments that Lebanese and French planners had to a pastoral vision of the Lebanese countryside. This idealized vision of the rural illuminates how rapid urbanization proceeded alongside seemingly contradictory ideological agendas: preserving an undeveloped pastoral landscape for touristic exploitation while developing a robust agricultural sector to deter rural flight.

During my extended fellowship at the OIB, I will begin work on a new project focused on the political economy of culture, tourism, and aesthetics in the Eastern Mediterranean. My research builds on the work of Fernand Braudel, Jairus Banaji, and Raymond Williams by examining the urban and cultural transformations of Mediterranean cities from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The project explores how urban landscapes evolved and were perceived as their political and economic structures shifted from imperial to colonial to postcolonial forms, and how visual and cultural products emerged from these transformations to reify a nostalgic ideal of the region.