The JHI is pleased to announce our 2024-25 New Media Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow—Chloe Bordewich. Chloe was our 2023-24 JHI-CDHI Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow and we're delighted that she will join us again during our Undergrounds/Underworlds theme year.
Chloe Bordewich is a historian focused on empire, media, and language politics in the modern Middle East. She received her PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University (2022) and subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship in public history at Boston University, working with the U.S. National Archives Museum. From 2023-24, she was the Critical Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at JHI. Chloe is also a founder of the Boston Little Syria Project, which documents Boston’s first Arabic speaking community through walking tours, in exhibitions, and online. Her current book project explores the fight for freer access to information in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. While at JHI in 2024-25, she will be working on a bilingual (Arabic/English) play that explores the everyday impact of surveillance amid the destruction of Cairo’s historic tombs.
Fellowship Project
“Exit Here for Paradise”
Chloe’s project for 24-25 is a one-act play that explores the intimate consequences of surveillance amid the destruction of Cairo’s historic tombs. Performed in a mix of Arabic and English, the work will challenge audience members to grapple with the fallout from conclusions based on misdirected attention and eavesdropped conversations.