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About Maggie Freeman
Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests encompass the histories and material cultures of nomadism, the uses of architecture by nomadic peoples, and historical interactions of empires and nomadic populations. Her primary focus is on how the built environment of the Middle East is experienced and shaped by nomadic peoples.Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.
NBN Episodes hosted by Maggie:
February 17, 2026
The Far Edges of the Known World
When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his new bleak and barbarous surroundings. Like many Greeks and Roman…
November 13, 2025
State Builders from the Steppe
State Builders from the Steppe: A History of the First Bulgarian Empire (This is RETHINK, 2025) explores how the Proto-Bulgarians were able to build b…
October 27, 2025
A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia
As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. S…
September 28, 2025
Landscapes of Warfare
Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) offers an in-depth exploration of the Urarti…
August 1, 2025
The Nomadic Origin of the State
Contemporary, commonly-accepted understandings of the history of Chinese state formation see the nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe as periph…
July 8, 2025
The Roma: A Travelling History
The word Roma conjures images of free-spirited nomads, creative and easy-going people who choose to eschew social conformity for personal independence…
January 15, 2025
The Political Ecology of Violence
From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of e…
December 7, 2024
Persistent Pastoralism: Monuments and Settlements in the Archaeology of Dhofar
Today I talked to Joy McCorriston about Persistent Pastoralism: Monuments and Settlements in the Archaeology of Dhofar (Archaeopress Publishing, 2023)…
August 30, 2024
Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires
No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating th…
July 14, 2024
Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE
Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making…
July 12, 2024
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the intersections of three entities other…
April 24, 2024
"Akmaral" (Regal House, 2024)
Inspired by the legends of Amazon women warriors told by ancient Greek historian Herodotus and evidenced by recent archaeological discoveries in Centr…
April 24, 2024
"Akmaral" (Regal House, 2024)
Inspired by the legends of Amazon women warriors told by ancient Greek historian Herodotus and evidenced by recent archaeological discoveries in Centr…
March 12, 2024
Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013
In Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013:: An Anthropological Approach (Routledge, 2023), Emilie Le Febvre takes us to the …
March 8, 2024
Dune, Part Two
Part Two of director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films embeds viewers among the Fremen, the Indigenous inhabitants of the planet Arrakis. The sole source …
January 22, 2024
The Crusader States and their Neighbours
Nicholas Morton’s The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187 (Oxford UP, 2020) explores the military history of the medie…
January 19, 2024
ReSounding Poverty
Adriana Helbig's book ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a micro ethnography of economic netw…
December 2, 2023
Empires of the Steppes
The “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These…
September 24, 2023
The Secret History of the Mongols
The Secret History of the Mongols is one of the literary wonders of the world. Writing in the thirteenth century, the Secret Historian - whose identit…
July 29, 2023
Archaeology and Nomadism in the Russian Empire
In the second half of the 19th century, both professional and amateur archaeologists, surveyors, and explorers of the “periphery” of the Russian Empi…
June 25, 2023
Mongol Nomadism, Mongol Identity, and the Fall of the Mongol Empire
In part two of our conversation about his book The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), Nicholas M…
June 21, 2023
Constant’s “New Babylon"
“New Babylon” is an architectural and urban planning project designed by the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys between 1959 and 1974 in response to ce…
June 16, 2023
Bedouin Bureaucrats
In the late 19th century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated int…
June 7, 2023
Hiking Trails, Sustainable Tourism, and Bedouin Heritage
Ben Hoffler is the co-founder of several hiking trails in the Middle East, including the Sinai Trail, the Red Sea Mountain Trail, the Wadi Rum Trail, …