Gabriel Young is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies doctoral program. He is currently writing a dissertation on the social history of state formation in Basra and the borderlands of southern Iraq between the 1920s and 1960s. Gabriel is interested in urban history, critical geography, and Marxist social theory, and has published in International Labor and Working-Class History, Jadaliyya, and the Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World.