About

Xiaoyue Yasin Li is an Assistant Professor of History and MENA Studies at Tulane University. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2021.

 

As a historian of the modern Middle East, Xiaoyue Li’s scholarship centers on techno-infrastructure within its broader social milieu in Egypt, and explores the interplay of materiality, technology, capitalism, and everyday politics. His book manuscript in preparation, Taming an Iron Horse: Capital, Politics, and Rail Infrastructure in Egypt, revisits the modern Middle East as frontier of empires and its entrenched entanglement with global histories of capitalism, empire, and resistance. Taking an infrastructural approach, this study accentuates the multilayered politics in motion at an empire’s frontier that oscillated between modernity and indigeneity, capitalization and decolonization, autocratic reality and democratic ethos.

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His research has been published in the International Journals of Middle East Studies, Technology and Culture, and by Brill Publishers. He is honorably the co-winner of the Middle East Studies Association's (MESA) Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in Social Sciences in 2022. 

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Besides this current project, Li harbors a wide range of scholarly interests, including technology-/infrastructure-induced social inequality, global interactions, and the (de)construction of the Third World, where he joyfully gleans ideas for future research projects and teaching.

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Contact Information: yasinli@tulane.edu