UNIQ Research Internships - A deep dive into the Faculty of History’s Moving Stories Project

Among the research projects based in the Faculty of History, Moving Stories is a five-year large-scale project funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant under the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.  The project explores a constellation of questions related to belief and belonging among Ottoman subjects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with a particular interest in dynamics of migration, mobility, and the formation of communal identities.  Under the direction of John-Paul Ghobrial (Professor of Modern and Global History, Balliol College), the research team comprises five postdoctoral fellows who together work across a range of Middle Eastern and European languages over a vast geography that stretches from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas. 

This summer, the Moving Stories team were happy to welcome three undergraduate interns as part of the University’s UNIQ+ Research Internship programme.  UNIQ+ offers university students from under-represented groups the chance to pursue research at a postgraduate level in Oxford.  Moreover, the participation of Moving Stories in the UNIQ+ programme meant that it was possible to integrate a number of undergraduate students directly into the collaborative work that takes place in the context of a Faculty research project.  Students who applied to UNIQ+ were given a choice of internships across several different faculties, and three choices in the History Faculty itself.  From a competitive and extremely talented field of applications, Moving Stories extended internship offers to three students: Josh Grundy-Tenn, a second-year student reading Ancient History and History at the University of Nottingham; Ebru Gürbüz, a second-year student reading History at the University of Cambridge; and Aysha Majeed, a second-year student in History and Political Science at the University of Birmingham.  The students came to Oxford for a period of six weeks in July and August 2024.   

Moving Stories follows the dispersed traces that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle Eastern migrants left in a variety of archives. The interns did four weeks of independent research based on a handful of project objectives and research needs identified in advance by the Moving Stories team.  Taken together, the three interns helped the project to navigate a trove of information and sources that are fragmented across countries and institutions. Aysha Majeed, for example, gathered scattered accounts of early twentieth-century Muslim communities in the Americas. Josh Grundy-Tenn mined digitized early twentieth-century American newspapers for little-known episodes of violent conflict among Arabic-speaking migrants and information on the lecture circuit on “Syrian” and “Eastern” subjects. Ebru Gürbüz sifted through back issues of the Syrian World, a journal published by the Syrian diaspora in America in the 1930s, in order to recover the political and cultural lives of the ‘Syrian-American’ diaspora. The last weeks of the internship were reserved for writing up findings and preparing for a final presentation for the UNIQ+ programme.   

Alongside this project research, the Moving Stories UNIQ+ internship gave the three students an opportunity to develop and refine their own independent work including research towards their third-year theses in their home institutions.  In some cases, this meant taking advantage of the opportunity of collaboration with the postdoctoral researchers in order to explore further the academic literature on migration and methodological approaches to the study of diasporas.  In other cases, interns benefitted from direct access to primary sources available only in Oxford – for example, Josh Grundy-Tenn worked in the archives of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s.  In other words, the summer provided the interns with an opportunity for their own intellectual development whilst becoming fully-fledged members of the Moving Stories team.  It is hoped that in this way some of the project’s own distinctive methodologies have already come to shape the nature of scholarship in this field.   

One of the most stimulating aspects of the internship - both for the full-time members of the Moving Stories team and for the interns as well - was the chance to think out loud about the academic research process. Some of these conversations were sparked by the interns’ experiences adjusting to life and leisure in Oxford, for example, comparing the best libraries to work in. Others found us comparing notes about writing; the contrast between the rapid-fire deadlines of a typical term and the more flexible schedule of academic research stood out in this regard. More broadly, the collaborative nature of the work pushed us all to think about data collection in a conscientious way: how can we preserve and present information collected online for other researchers? How can we make sure someone else can re-trace our digital steps? 

It was also a pleasure to see the interns express their academic and often personal interests in the materials at hand. Whether or not this internship serves as a stepping-stone to post-graduate study, we enjoyed seeing sparks of passionate curiosity in the interns. They seem to have found in the historical documents that engaging mix of fact and fiction that drives historical inquiry - a wealth of information coloured by subtle shades of interpretation. It was affirming, as well, to hear the interns’ pleasant surprise at the abundance of relatively little-explored materials on Middle Eastern migrants in the Americas at the turn of the twentieth century. We hope the excitement of discovery will continue to accompany them in future studies. It was certainly in evidence during their final presentations, which highlighted both their able analysis of historical sources and a valuable talent for story-telling. Blog posts written by interns will be made available on the Moving Stories website shortly. 

For us in the Moving Stories team, collaborating with the interns gave us a chance to satisfy some of our own burgeoning curiosities. The interns’ work gave us a better sense of a number of phenomena that shaped the experience of Middle Eastern migrants. We now have a range of new characters and episodes to investigate, each an important node in our reconstruction of these scattered diasporic histories. In this way, the interns have opened up new avenues for further research on the complex identities of Middle Eastern diasporas in an era of mass migration. We thank them and wish them well! 

- Joseph Leidy & John-Paul Ghobrial