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India Reporting

Syriac Churches and Sephardic Synagogues: The Urban Legacy of Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanism in Kerala

Posted on June 11, 2016 by Alex Shams

Originally published by Ajam Media Collective on March 2, 2016. At the southwestern tip of India in the state of Kerala sits the elegant port city of Kochi, the bustling

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Alex Shams is an Iranian-American writer and a PhD student of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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Born and raised in an Iranian-American family in Los Angeles, Alex Shams has long been fascinated by the stories that places can tell us. Growing up, he learned Persian and Spanish; in college, he learned Arabic and studied abroad at the American University of Cairo before moving to Beirut after graduation. After receiving his master’s in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard, he moved to Bethlehem, Palestine, where he was a journalist at Ma’an News Agency, the largest independent Palestinian news organization. He received his PhD. from the University of Chicago in Sociocultural Anthropology. His dissertation, entitled “Constructing Islamic Modernity: Power, Religion, and Masculinity in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” was based on three years of ethnographic research in Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan as well as archival research in the British Library and Ba’ath Party Archives.

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