Gabriel Young joins CMES as the Alomran Family Postdoctoral Research Associate in Middle East Studies. Gabriel is a social historian of twentieth-century Iraq and the Persian Gulf, with a research and teaching focus on state formation, agrarian change and resource extraction. His book project explores the relationship between natural resource sovereignty and political rule from the perspective of communities living along the resource frontier of Basra in southern Iraq. Gabriel's work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Labor and Working-Class History and Jadaliyya.