GU-Q Faculty Fellowship

In order to enhance research opportunities for members of the university, CIRS ‎launched an annual fellowship to be awarded to a member of the GU-Q faculty. The ‎fellowship supports original research, and is awarded to ‎faculty members who propose to use the time granted to pursue high quality projects ‎with promising prospects for publication in leading journals or university presses. The ‎fellowship entails a one-course release from teaching per academic year, in either the ‎fall or spring semester, to a deserving member of the SFS-Q faculty to enable ‎concentration on a research project. ‎The selected fellow is appointed for one academic year, and is expected to be in ‎residence in Doha during the period of the fellowship. Fellows will be asked to give a ‎presentation of their research at a CIRS-sponsored talk, and, where possible, to ‎contribute to CIRS’s research agenda. ‎

CIRS GU-Q Faculty Fellow 2020-2021

Eddie final

Eddie Kolla has taught history for 10 years at Georgetown University in Qatar. He has also held research fellowships, most recently, at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. His work sits at the intersection of history, international relations, and law and includes Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2017).

He is currently finishing a book on the history of passports. People take it for granted that they require a passport to travel. And yet, surprisingly, neither the form nor function of today’s passport is codified in international law. Rather, the story of how these little booklets developed is an incredibly idiosyncratic one, in which a number of features of travel documents throughout history informally and haphazardly coalesced into the now-ubiquitous and indispensable passport, issued and accepted by states around the world but still lacking a solid foundation in international law.