Lacy Feigh is the Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and History at Princeton University. A historian of modern Ethiopia and the greater Nile Valley, her research focuses on legacies of slavery, empire, and constructions of race in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her broader work aims to bridge histories of Africa and the Middle East through the lives of individuals and ideas which traveled widely across these historiographically-imposed borders.

Feigh holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania where she specialized in themes of race, labor, and migration in modern Africa and the Middle East. At Penn, her work was supported by Fulbright and the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship. Prior to her graduate work, Feigh served as an English Education Volunteer with the Peace Corps in Yirgalem, Ethiopia and worked as an English Teaching Assistant with Fulbright in Amman, Jordan. 

The term häbäsha—häbäsh, habeş, Abyssinian—is usually defined simply as ‘Ethiopian’ in scholarship and sources of the Middle East. It is particularly noted in studies and sources of slavery in the Middle East, where the term is often deployed to describe enslaved concubines and eunuchs who are said to come from the lands of Ethiopia. Within modern Ethiopia, however, the notion of häbäsha identity was itself contested throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as imperial state expansion attempted to reshape notions of belonging and difference throughout newly annexed and conquered territories in the Horn of Africa. Understanding the conflicts around häbäsha identity in the formation of modern Ethiopian state allows us to better grasp how it was deployed in the modern Middle East: not simply as a marker of place, but as an identity deeply implicated in racialized and gendered discourses of empire and enslavement. Crucially, a rethinking of häbäsha identity rooted in African history urges us toward a complex and multidimensional understanding of the African diaspora in the Middle East.