Middle Eastern History

1919 Women's Demo

The study of Middle Eastern history at Illinois draws on departmental faculty with particular expertise in Arab, Iranian and Ottoman history in the modern and early modern periods, in the areas of social and legal history, demographic and family history, religion, nationalism, and agrarian history (see faculty list below).

Our history department ranks among the top ten in public institutions, and the University ofIllinois Library is the third largest academic library in the United States. The Library became a PL480/ Library of Congress repository for Arabic materials in 1965, and also houses collections in Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew. The Africana library section is an important additional resource, with its holdings related to Islamic and Arabophone Africa.

Our university’s Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies is the nation’s newest federally funded Title VI National Resource Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The Program promotes programming, research and teaching about, and public awareness of, the societies and cultures of South Asia and the Middle East. Title VI funding supports the teaching of Middle Eastern languages, new faculty lines, library collection development, K-12 outreach, and public lectures, panels and conferences that promote understanding of the Middle East in the community and add to the intellectual life of the university.

In 2006-07 the Middle Eastern languages taught at Illinois are Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish. Persian language instruction will begin in the fall of 2007. Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships are available to U.S. citizens or permanent residents through the Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies for the academic year as well as for summer programs. Incoming as well as continuing students are required to apply through the History department. The applicant’s primary geographical area of study should be the Middle East. If “Middle Eastern” language study is needed for other regions, FLAS fellowships are offered by other area studies units:

Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Foreign Language Enhancement Program (FLEP) scholarships are available to help students take advantage of language offerings not available at their home university, but available at another CIC (Big Ten schools plus U of Chicago) member university. Scholarships are intended to cover living expenses at another CIC host institution during the summer session. For more information contact Catherine Player.

The study of Middle Eastern history at Illinois is enhanced by the presence of several area, ethnic and cultural studies centers and programs outside the Department of History. These centers and programs sponsor public lecture series, workshops and conferences, bring visiting scholars, and in some cases offer fellowships. Illinois has seven Title VI area centers, including the Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for African Studies, which includes North Africa in its purview, and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, which covers the former Ottoman lands of Southeastern Europe as well as the Caucasus and Central Asia. Additional resources are the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, the Asian American Studies Program, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the Center for Global Studies.

Middle East & North Africa History Faculty

Statue of Saddam falling down in Iraq
  • Kenneth M. Cuno - Egypt and the Levant, 18th-20th c.; demographic and family history, Islamic law in society, rural history, nationalism, Arab-Israeli conflict.
  • Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi – Iran; transnational and global histories; contemporary histories of the Middle East, Islam and modernity, revolution, social theory, social movements, and politics and power.
  • Maria Todorova -Eastern Europe and Ottoman Empire; demographic and family history, Balkan historiography, nationalism.
  • Keith Hitchins - Romania and Yugoslavia, the Kurds, and Central Asia; the Ottoman Empire in Europe, comparative nationalism
  • David Prochaska - Postcolonial studies; history of Orientalism; Colonial India, Algeria and Egypt.

Related Faculty

  • Marilyn Booth (Program in Comparative and World Literatures). Arabic literature, gender and sexuality, translation.
  • Hadi S. Esfahani (Department of Economics). Comparative development economics; Egypt, Iran, Philippines, Turkey.
  • Colin Flint (Department of Geography). Political geography; war and peace, terrorism, American hegemony, and the Arab world.
  • Wail Hassan (Program in Comparative and World Literatures). Arabic literature, critical theory, transnational studies, gender and sexuality, translation
  • Valerie Hoffman (Program for the Study of Religion). Islam; Sufism, women in Islam and Muslim societies, and contemporary Islamic movements
  • David O'Brien (Program in Art History). French Orientalist painting, the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt, modernist art in the Islamic world.
  • Panayiota Pyla (School of Architecture). History and theory of modern architecture and urbanism in the postcolonial Middle East; intersections of modern architecture with the history and politics of development and environmentalism.
  • Junaid Rana (Asian American Studies Program). South Asian Americans, diaspora, Pakistan, labor history, Muslims and migration, racial formation, and social movements.
  • D. Fairchild Ruggles (Department of Landscape Architecture). Visual culture and the built environment of the Islamic world; landscape history; women'spatronage.
  • Mahir Saul (Department of Anthropology). West Africa; Muslims in Europe and America.