Department of Sociology

Jonathan Wyrtzen (Ph.D. Georgetown, 2009) is a comparative-historical sociologist with teaching and research interests in North African society and politics. He works on the areas of state formation; colonialism and empire; ethnicity and nationalism; urban and rural contentious politics; and Islamic social movements. He is completing a book manuscript titled, Constructing Morocco: Colonial State-Building and the Struggle to Define the Nation (1912-1961), that examines the relationships among European imperial expansion, colonial policies of modernization and state formation, and the rise of Arabo-Islamic nationalism in North Africa in the mid-20th century. This study also explores the central roles of three marginal groups – Imazighen (Berbers), Jews, and women - in defining Moroccan identity during the mobilization of anti-colonial nationalism. He is beginning another project comparing tribal insurgency movements against colonial states in the 1920s in North Africa and the Middle East.