Book talk: "Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East"

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents

Febe Armanios
Philip Battell and Sarah Frances Cowles Stewart Professor of History, Middlebury College

Febe Armanios received her BA, MA, and Ph.D. from the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the history of Christian communities in the Middle East, especially Egypt’s Copts, and on comparative religious practices, including in food and media studies. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Luce Foundation-ACLS, and Fordham University, among others. In 2015-16, she was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School (ILSP), and in 2021-22, she was named the Bennett Boskey Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at Williams College. From 2019 to 2023, she served with Marion Wells as a founding co-Director of Middlebury’s Axinn Center for the Humanities. As part of her work with the Axinn Center, she has also served as a co-Principal Investigator on two major grants from the Davis Educational Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.

Armanios has published three monographs and several articles and book chapters. Her books include "Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East" (Oxford UP, 2025; Finalist for Christianity Today’s 2025 Book Awards) and "Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt" (Oxford UP, 2011); she is also co-author with Boğaç Ergene of "Halal Food: A History" (Oxford UP, 2018; winner of the Best Book Award 2019 by the Association for the Study of Food and Society). Currently, she is researching the history of Christian food practices in Ottoman and post-Ottoman regions, including Egypt, Cyprus, Lebanon, Greece, and Turkey.

Contact: Liz Flanagan