Omar Sirri

Visiting Fellow

Omar Sirri is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. His current book project, tentatively titled Circulating the State: An Ethnography of Checkpoints in Contemporary Baghdad, explores how infrastructures of security in Iraq’s capital city work to produce the state, even amidst persistent security breakdowns and failures. Some of this research has appeared in academic journals and public-facing online platforms, including Cultural Anthropology and Society and Space Magazine. Omar’s manuscript is based on his doctoral dissertation, which in 2022 was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences from the Middle East Studies Association.