Dr. Rebecca Gruskin joins Queen’s University as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global History. Her scholarship spans social history, environmental history, and the history of capitalism, with a focus on mining industries in modern North Africa and the Middle East. She is a graduate of Stanford University (Ph.D. 2021, M.A. 2015) and Harvard University (A.B. 2011).
Her current book project, preliminarily titled Tunisia in Global Capitalism: Phosphates, Empire, and Resistance, writes modern Tunisia into the world history of capitalism and heavy-input agriculture. Through a social and environmental history of Tunisia’s Gafsa phosphate mines under French colonialism and after independence, she rethinks definitions of capitalism that prioritize the European experience. Her book combines local and global histories of labour activism, anti-colonial resistance, commodity markets, workplace accidents, and industrial pollution, weaving together oral histories from Gafsa with archival research across North Africa, Europe, and North America. Thus far, her research in Tunisia and France has been generously supported by the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.
Dr. Gruskin has published most recently in the Journal of Global History (“The Value within Multiform Commodities: North African Phosphates and Global Markets in the Interwar Period”). Her next article explores the history of X-ray photography and chronic injury in 1920s-1930s Gafsa, advocating methods of source analysis that do not prioritize the visible.
In the past academic year, Dr. Gruskin taught courses on the global history of counterinsurgency and on labour migration in modern North Africa and the Middle East. In 2017, she received the Stanford History Department’s Prize for Excellence in a Graduate Student Designed and Taught Course. This year at Queen’s, she is delighted to be teaching History 109, “War and Revolution in the Modern World.”
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Rebecca Gruskin
