Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: Zachary Davis Cuyler, Assistant Professor, History, “Fossil Lebanon in US Empire: Pipeline Politics and the Making of the Lebanese State”
Faculty Fellow Lecture Series
April 8, 2026
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
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As Lebanon secured its formal independence in the aftermath of the Second World War, it passed from French colonial control under a League of Nations Mandate to a novel form of informal and infrastructural US empire. As neighboring Palestine faced partition and nakba, and Syria experienced the postwar era's first US-backed coup, Lebanon became a terminal for a major US-owned oil pipeline that moved Saudi crude to Western Europe to fuel postwar reconstruction. This lecture will examine the role played by Lebanon’s postcolonial elite in the process of making Lebanon into a conduit for oil within this imperial assemblage, the porous boundaries between this national elite and US corporate and state power, and the long-term consequences of this moment of postcolonial state-formation for Lebanon's political and economic history.
Zack Cuyler is an Assistant Professor of History at UIC. His scholarship focuses on the historical and contemporary politics of energy, infrastructure, and the environment in the mashriq. His book project, Fossil Lebanon, examines how Lebanon's relationship to the oil industry shaped the country's politics, economy, and built environment across the mid-20th century.
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Date posted
May 28, 2025
Date updated
Mar 20, 2026