Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her dissertation, "The Principle of Desert Control: Imperial Architecture and the Bedouin in the British Mandatory Middle East (1920-1948)", examines how the built environment was mobilized and manipulated to control Bedouin nomadic pastoralists under British Mandatory authority in Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine, and how members of the Bedouin responded to and influenced building projects intended to control or surveil them.