Nour Alsabagh

Nour Alsabagh is a PhD candidate in History working at the intersection of environmental history and Science and Technology Studies. Her research examines how infrastructures, particularly irrigation and river transport, functioned as instruments of authority in late Ottoman and Mandate-era Iraq. 

Drawing on archival material from the Foreign Office and India Office Records, her thesis traces how interventions in rivers, canals, and transport networks reshaped landscapes while reorganising labour, governance, and economic relations. 

Her work engages several interconnected strands. One examines irrigation as both material intervention and ideological project, often framed through claims of restoration and improvement. Another explores mapping and survey practices as techniques for making complex environments legible, enabling administrative control while reducing ecological variability. A further line of inquiry considers riverine mobility, focusing on the introduction of steam navigation and its tensions with existing forms of movement, alongside the environmental and social disruptions that followed. 

She also studies marshland environments as sites that exposed the limits of large-scale engineering, where vernacular technologies and local practices persisted in ways that complicated imperial ambitions. Nour holds a BA in Politics and Philosophy from the University of Essex and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS, University of London.

Environmental history and Science and Technology Studies, with a focus on infrastructure and political authority in SWANA.

Irrigation, river engineering, and transport systems as sites of imperial intervention and contestation. 

Mapping and survey practices, and the production of legibility for administrative control. 

Riverine mobility, including steam navigation and its interaction with existing forms of movement.

Marshland environments and vernacular technologies, with attention to the limits of large scale engineering.