Paul Kohlbry

I am an anthropologist who studies agrarian life. My research brings together critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and legal anthropology. In my current book project, I explore the struggles of rural Palestinians against settler colonial dispossession and the dissolution of peasant agriculture. I study how people in the highlands of Palestine combine cooperation, mutual aid, and private ownership into a theory and practice of anti-colonial commoning. The book engages with marginalized traditions of agrarian anti-colonialism and vernacular critiques of privatization to consider why ownership is inseparable from hopes for a good life in rural places today.

My next research project is a multi-sited ethnography of date farming across the arid zones of California, Palestine, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates. I will study how date farms in these regions are connected by imperial war, market competition, and concerns over climate change. I am interested in the sorts of investments—economic, technological, and political—that go into making large-scale commercial agriculture sustainable and desirable in places facing ecological collapse.

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. I received my PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in 2019. Prior to Cornell, I held postdoctoral positions at Brown University and the University of Chicago.