Richard Harrod is a PhD Candidate in the department of history at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses broadly on the social and political history of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Middle East and Indian Ocean, with special concentration on the Arab World. Within these larger contours, he concentrates on the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, particularly the regions that are present-day Yemen and Oman.

His dissertation, “Oil, Onions, and Education: A Social History of Development in Oman from the 1950s to the 1980s” focuses on the reactions of Omanis to the great social and economic changes that took place in their society in the latter half of the twentieth century as a result of the search for—and eventual exploitation of—oil. His project utilizes a combination of political, social, environmental, and oral history methods and examines three principal groups: oil workers, farmers, and educators. It situates their achievements and challenges within the context of a new history of the formative developments of Oman’s government, and the geographic spread of its state apparatuses.

His education and research have been generously supported by the WashU history department, the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation, the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, New York University Abu Dhabi, The Center for Arabic Studies Abroad, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), and the US Fulbright Research Program. He has studied Arabic at the University of Chicago Summer Language Institute, the Middlebury College Arabic School, the Sultan Qaboos Institute for the Teaching of Arabic to Non-Native Speakers in Oman, and the Qasid Institute in Jordan. He is currently a Fellow with the WashU Center for the Humanities.

He is the author of “The Sul‏‏ṭān’s Treatise: Development and Contending Visions of Oman’s Future in the Late-Nineteen Sixties” published in The Journal of Arabian Studies.

His second journal article, “The Making of the Duruʿ Working Class: Empire, Oil, and Resistance in Fahud, Oman from the 1950s to the 1970s” has been published in Middle East Critique. It is part of an upcoming special issue entitled: “Situating the Gulf’s Anti-Imperialist Currents in History and Theory.”

Richard earned a BA in history and classics from Monmouth College (Illinois), an MA in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Chicago, and an AM in history from WashU.