Mahdi Zaidan is a doctoral candidate in human geography at King’s College London, where his ESRC-funded thesis studies the political economy and history of (post-)oil infrastructure in the Arabian Peninsula. His work traces the oil-development nexus through the lens of economic planning, conservation and energy transition. He returns to Georgetown, where he took his MA in Arab Studies in 2018, to examine the Aramco collections held at the Booth Family Center for Special Collections. He is interested in the company’s records as evidence of how a fossil-fuel economy was assembled. How such an economy might be wound down is the question his thesis pursues into the present. Prior to his PhD, he held the William Wyse Studentship for the MPhil in social anthropology at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is also a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies, writing on climate, water and conflict in the Middle East for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
