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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:
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…
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 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, …
May 22, 2023
Embracing Landscape
Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, Embracing Landscape: Living with Reindee…
April 3, 2023
Nomad, Nomad
In his debut short story collection, Nomad, Nomad (Bound to Brew, 2021), Jonan Pilet explores the lives of Mongols and expats looking for a sense of h…
March 31, 2023
The Transformation of Livestock Herding in Socialist Mongolia
Between 1956 and 1960, leaders in the Mongolian People’s Republic embarked on a collectivization campaign to change the way in which Mongolians intera…
February 13, 2023
Jangar: The Heroic Epic of the Kalmyk Nomads
Saga Bougdaeva is the translator of the first English version of Jangar (University of California Press, 2023), the heroic epic of the Kalmyk nomads. …
February 10, 2023
Star Wars: Andor’s Aldhani and its Real-World Parallels
In this episode, Dr. Kenny Linden, an environmental and animal historian of Mongolia and Inner Asia, joins me to discuss the Disney+ Star Wars prequel…
January 27, 2023
Words Like Daggers: The Political Poetry of the Negev Bedouin
For generations, the composition and recitation of poetry has been a key mode of expression among Bedouin populations in the Middle East, reflecting s…
January 24, 2023
Pastures of Change
Tibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobil…
January 12, 2023
The Sámi in "Frozen" (Part 2)
The traditional folklore and animistic beliefs of the Sámi, the Indigenous nomadic peoples of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia, are under-…