Middle East & North Africa
The field of Middle East history is particularly strong at Georgetown. Our program is most known for its emphasis on the social, cultural, and political history of the early modern and modern Arab World and of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Our doctoral students, in keeping with the research interests of the Middle East faculty and the wider department, are working on topics related to the history of the environment, gender, commodities, social movements, colonialism and post-colonialism, and the military in the Middle East.
Georgetown has unusually rich resources on the Arab World. In the Department of History, Professors Abi-Mershed, Haddad, Tucker, and Voll focus their research on the Arab World, with current projects on subjects as diverse as colonialism, state-building and violence, gender and Mediterranean piracy, Islamic revolutionary movements, and Islamic law and gender. We have research experience in the Maghrib, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and the Arab Gulf. There are numerous supporting faculty in other departments who work in the Arab World as well. The Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies has rich faculty resources in Arabic literature, both classical and modern, as well as Islamic Studies. Faculty at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) specializes in the anthropology and politics of the Arab World, and many of our Ph.D. students take advantage of their courses and their guidance.
The Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey constitute another of our strengths. Professors Agoston and Aksakal have complementary research interests including the military and economic history of the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, and Kemalist Turkey. The study of the Ottomans reaches to the Balkans and the Arab lands, and many of our Ph.D. students seize the opportunity to construct programs that combine Ottoman/Turkey and Arab regions, as well as the Ottomans and their rivals, the Habsburg Monarchy and Romanov Russia. There are additional faculty resources in the anthropology and politics of modern Turkey available through the Institute for Turkish Studies housed at Georgetown University.
Many of our students choose to continue their study of the languages of the Middle East while at Georgetown. We have a nationally-acclaimed Arabic program that offers instruction from the basic level right through to advanced literature and content-based courses. Students in our program can also study modern Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew at all instructional levels. In addition to the Middle East and North Africa seminar series held under the auspices of the Georgetown Institute for Global History, which brings historians of the region to campus for in-depth seminar presentations, CCAS also hosts an active program of lectures and seminars on the Arab World, many of which are of interest to our students.
View a list of Faculty specializing in the Middle East and North Africa.
View a list of Ph.D. Students specializing in the Middle East and North Africa.