Rosie Bsheer is a historian of the modern Middle East. Her teaching and research interests center on Arab intellectual and social movements, petro-capitalism and state formation, and the production of historical knowledge and commemorative spaces. She is the author of Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 AGAPS Biennial Book Award, sponsored by the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies, and the 2021 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, sponsored by the American Library Association. Archive Wars also received Honorable Mention in the 2021 Nikki Keddie Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), and was selected as one of Foreign Affairs’ “The Best of Books 2021.”

Bsheer is currently working on a manuscript on the history of private property in Saudi Arabia. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on oil and empire, social and intellectual movements, political economy, historiography, and the making of the modern Middle East. She is Associate Producer of the 2007 Oscar-nominated film My Country, My Country, Co-Editor of Jadaliyya E-zine, Associate Editor of Tadween Publishing, and member of the Editorial Board of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Whiting Foundation. She received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University (2014) and comes to Harvard University from Yale University, where she was Assistant Professor of History (2014–2018). She is the recipient of the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching at Yale University (2017) and Yale College’s Sarai Ribicoff '75 Award for the Encouragement of Teaching (2018).