معرفی
Shira Pinhas is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at Princeton University’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Her research bridges social and material history, examining how infrastructures like oil pipelines, refineries, and road networks shaped political and social dynamics in twentieth-century Palestine/Israel and the Levant. She holds a PhD from Tel Aviv University and previously served as a Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Before academia, she spent a decade organizing in Palestinian-Jewish NGOs focused on social justice.
Her primary research interests include Middle Eastern Studies, particularly the intersection of colonialism, gender, and infrastructure. She investigates how transnational flows of energy and technology reinforced settler-colonial hierarchies and spatial segregation, as seen in her work on oil infrastructures and partition policies.
Pinhas’s publications analyze the political implications of infrastructure, such as road networks and energy systems, in the Mandate period. Her 2025 article "The Gender of Fossil Fuels" highlights gendered impacts of kerosene adoption, while her 2022 works trace British imperial legacies in partition strategies. A 2020 paper in Journal of Levantine Studies explores transnational dimensions of Palestinian partition debates.
- Award: Best Dissertation Award (MEISAI, 2020)
Her academic contributions extend beyond traditional research, including community organizing and policy-focused writing. She collaborates with transregional scholars and contributes to public discourse through media outlets like +972 Magazine.
