The Center for Middle East Studies at UCSB is proud to announce the recipient for the 2026 Nancy Gallery Best Undergraduate Essay Prize is Alexandra Abdo. Abdo is a second year undergraduate student, majoring in Political Science and Philosophy. Her awarded paper, “A Comparative Analysis of Primary and Secondary Sources on Twentieth-Century Land Legislation in Colonial Algeria” was written for an Independent Study course with Professor Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (Global Studies). The paper “argues that twentieth-century land legislation in colonial Algeria did not abandon the dispossessive logic of the nineteenth century; instead, it reorganized that logic into a more administrative, fiscal, and bureaucratically normalized system.” The distinction in the twentieth century, Abdo shows, is that “the colonial state increasingly governs through settlement planning, fiscal extraction, domain administration, eligibility rules, and technical measures that stabilize European occupation and regularize the transfer of land into a mature settler order.” The paper builds its central argument through a close reading of primary sources, including official legislative compilations and colonial administration publications, and an analysis of secondary sources with a focus on that legislative record.
The faculty review committee lauded Abdo’s paper as “polished and analytically rigorous,” noting it was “scholarly, ambitious, clear, and accomplished.” They also commended Prof. Hamed-Troyansky's admirable mentorship and supervision of Abdo's independent study that resulted in this award winning paper.
The Nancy Gallagher Best Undergraduate Essay Prize in Middle East Studies is given annually for undergraduate papers on topics in Middle East Studies. Awarded papers are conducted with careful research producing imaginative arguments. The prize is named in honor of UCSB Professor Emerita Nancy Gallagher, a historian of the Middle East and North Africa, who helped build the thriving intellectual community that is CMES.