Dr. A. George Bajalia is a sociocultural anthropologist and curator concerned with borderlands, primarily across the Mediterranean region. Dr. Bajalia holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and a doctoral certificate from Columbia's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. His current book project, Waiting at the Border: Language, Labor, and Infrastructure in the Strait of Gibraltar, dwells on the political, social, and cultural forms that emerge during time spent waiting among cross-border workers and West and Central African immigrants living and working around the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands surrounding Tangier, Morocco and Ceuta, Spain. He is developing a future project that explores the ways in which the idea of Palestine has been imagined and enacted across the 20th and 21st centuries, in both the MENA region and beyond, with regard to this idea's discursive history and the ways in which the circulation and imprimentations of this idea in differing contexts contain alternative horizons imagining the possibility of the future of the Middle East and North Africa. 

At Wesleyan, Dr. Bajalia is the director of the Minor program in Middle Eastern Studies and a co-founding member of Wesleyan's Committee on Palestine Studies, as well as an affiliated faculty in African Studies and a member of the the Indigenous Studies Research Network. He also inaugarated the the Wesleyan Anthropology Department's lab for exploration the intersections between anthropology, ethnography, curation, and artistic praxis. More on this can be found at https://intersections.wescreates.wesleyan.edu/. His courses at Wesleyan explore the relationships between anthropology, performance, and curation; migration and borderlands; endurance and the otherwise; the Anthropology of Islam; and theories of cultural and social change in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond.

Outside of Wesleyan, Dr. Bajalia is a member of the Board of the American Institute of Maghrib Studies (AIMS), the American Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theater, and a fellow of the Tangier American Legation Institute for Maghrib Studies (TALIM). He has served as grant juror for a variety of organizations, including most recently the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), and the Department of Arts and Culture for the City of New Haven. Prior to arriving at Wesleyan, he worked closely with the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University on their theatre, radio, and film programming, drawing on his background as a professional theatre director, associate director, and dramaturge with companies such as Silk Road Rising and The Goodman Theatre (Chicago) and collaborations with Moroccan arts organizations.

Dr. Bajalia is also the co-founder and co-director of the Youmein Festival, a 48-hour contemporary art and performance festival and residency in Tangier, Morocco. Throughout his work, he is interested in questions of temporality, circulation and exchange, structural and post-structural semiotics, regional formations, and the practices and politics of boundary-marking, belonging, and difference.

He has held research fellowships from the Mellon Foundation-CAORC, Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright-IIE, The Middle East Institue at Coulmbia University, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Wesleyan University Grants in Support of Scholarship program, and the Center for the Humanites at Wesleyan University, among other grants and fellowshps.

Representative Publications:

Refereed Publications

Bajalia, A. George. 2023. “Doing Barzakh, Making Boza: Betwixt and Between Migration and Immigration in Tangier.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 41 (1): 17–33. https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410103.

Bajalia, A. George. 2021. “Waiting and Working: Shared Difference and Labors of Belonging in Immigrant Tangier.” POMEPS Studies, 44 Racial Formations in Africa and the Middle East: A Transregional Approach (September). https://pomeps.org/waiting-and-working-shared-difference-and-labors-of-belonging-in-immigrant-tangier.

Bajalia, A. George. 2021. “Dima Africa, Daily Darija: Im/Migrant Sociality, Settlement, and State Policy in Tangier, Morocco.” The Journal of North African Studies 26 (5): 973–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2020.1800212.

Batmanghelichi, Kristin Soraya, A. George Bajalia, and Sami Al-Daghistani. 2020. “Introduction to the Special Issue Pluralism in Emergenc(i)Es in the Middle East and North Africa.” Review of Middle East Studies 54 (2): 162–73. https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.11. (Co-Editor of Special Issue)

Book Reviews:

Bajalia, A George. 2024. “Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands: Migrants’ Journeys Through Libya and the Mediterranean by Marthe Achtnich.” Political Science Quarterly, September, qqae101. https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqae101.

Public Scholarship

Bajalia, A. George. 2024. "In Between Silence." Hot Spots, Fieldsights, October 15. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/in-between-silence (Editor Reviewed)

Bajalia, A. George. 2023. “In and Out of Place in Tangier.” Makan Journal of Culture and Space 2 (Manufacturing Narratives). Rabat: KULTE Publishing. (Editor Reviewed)

Bajalia, A. George. 2022. “Basta with Al-Andalus.” CHERGUI. Marrakech: LE18. (https://www.academia.edu/98469311/What_Remains_From_al_Andalus) 

Bajalia, A. George. 2022. "Review: Pièces Détachèes, The work of Nassim Azarzar" K-oh-llective Reviews. https://kohllective.com/Pieces-Detachees (in Arabic here: https://kohllective.com/Pieces-Detachees_AR)

Bajalia, A. George, and Aida Alami. 2021. “Podcast: Roots and Traces of Contemporary Cultural Life in Tangier.” Tangier American Legation Museum (blog). September 16, 2021. https://legation.org/podcast-roots-and-traces-of-contemporary-cultural-life-in-tangier/.

Bajalia, A. George. 2021. “Borders/Breakdown.” In De La Dérive / On Drifting / ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿, edited by Justine Daquin, Zoé Le Voyer, Sanaa Zaghoud, and Manon Bachelier. Vilnius, Lithuania: JSC KOPA. https://calypso3621.com/archive/frontiere-repartition/)

Bajalia, A. George, and Francesca Masoero. 2020. “QANAT and The Art of Digging Holes in Water in Marrakech.” CHERGUI. Marrakech: LE18.

Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte, and A. George Bajalia. 2018. “Crossing into Ceuta.” Migrant Journal, no. 4, Dark Matters (June): 8–23. (Editor Reviewed) https://www.academia.edu/43333630/Crossing_into_Ceuta)

Bajalia, A. George. 2014. “Language Arts in Morocco: Reflections on the New Mohammed VI Modern and Contemporary Art Museum and a Conversation with Translator Zakaria Alilech – KALIMAT Art + Design.” November 19, 2014. http://www.kalimatmagazine.com/artdesign/14092337.

———. 2015 “Language, Theatre & Morocco’s February 20th Movement.” Muftah. http://muftah.org/language-theatre-moroccos-february-20th-movement/.