Catching up with Houssem Chachia

In 2017-18, Houssem Chachia was the inaugural recipient of the CMES Tunisia Postdoctoral Fellowship, part of the CMES Tunisia Office and related programming made possible by the support of Harvard College alumnus Hazem Ben-Gacem '92. The fellowship brings Tunisian scholars, especially those whose research includes Tunisia and North Africa, to Harvard for an academic year, to pursue their research and teach a course in their area of specialization. Chachia returned to Harvard for the 2025-26 academic year, this time as Shawwaf Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

What has your career path been like since you were the inaugural Hazem Ben-Gacem Postdoctoral Fellow at CMES during the 2017–18 academic year?

Since my year as the inaugural Hazem Ben-Gacem Postdoctoral Fellow at CMES, my academic career has continued to develop in close connection with the questions and perspectives that I began to explore more deeply during my time at Harvard. After returning to Tunisia, I resumed teaching and research at the University of Sfax. Then, at the beginning of the 2021-22 academic year, I moved to the University of Tunis, the oldest university in the country, where I am now Associate Professor of Early Modern Mediterranean History. In many ways, my return to Harvard this year has allowed me to see more clearly how important that first fellowship was in shaping my later academic path.

Over these years, I have continued to work on the history of Moriscos, Sephardic Jews, exile, conversion, and mobility across the early modern Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the Maghrib and Tunisia. My time at CMES was very important in helping me place these questions within broader Mediterranean and global frameworks.

I have also been fortunate to receive important recognition for my work. In 2020, I received the Prize for the Best Young Researcher in Tunisia, in the Humanities, awarded by Beit al-Hikma, the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts. More recently, in 2024, I was honored to receive the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for my second book, The Morisco Landscape: Narratives of Expulsion in Modern Spanish Thought. This recognition was especially meaningful because the book reflects many of my long-standing interests in Morisco history, memory, exile, and the ways the expulsion has been narrated and reinterpreted in Spanish thought.

What are your current research interests? What project have you been working on this year? Have you had the opportunity to collaborate with Harvard faculty or students?

My current research interests focus on the social and cultural history of Moriscos and Sephardic Jews in the early modern Mediterranean, especially questions of exile, mobility, religious identity, memory, and forms of survival after displacement.

The main project I have been working on this year is the critical edition and study of a rare seventeenth-century Morisco manuscript. I consider this manuscript one of the most important historical documents for the study of the Morisco question. I was especially fortunate that, only a few weeks before coming to Harvard, I was able to obtain a second copy of the manuscript, preserved in a Tunisian family library. I have now completed the critical edition and am currently writing the accompanying historical study.

My stay at Harvard has been extremely productive in terms of research and writing. In addition to working on this manuscript, I have developed and written several articles, some of which have already appeared and others that are forthcoming in journals and edited volumes. Most of these works deal with the social and cultural history of Sephardic Jews and Moriscos in the Mediterranean.

One important example was a lecture I gave in September 2025, titled “Ambassadors of a Lost Homeland: The Diplomacy of Survival in the Andalusian–Morisco Experience.” The lecture was organized by the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program and co-sponsored by the CMES. It allowed me to present part of my ongoing work on Morisco diplomacy and to think about Moriscos not only as victims of expulsion, but also as political actors who used negotiation, correspondence, and diplomacy as strategies of survival.

More broadly, my participation in lectures, seminars, and activities at CMES, NELC, and the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program has given me many opportunities to exchange ideas with Harvard faculty, students, and colleagues. These conversations have been very fruitful and have helped me refine my research questions, develop new perspectives, and build valuable academic relationships.

What courses did you teach this year? What did they cover?

This year, I taught three courses that reflected my broader interests in Mediterranean history, cross-cultural encounters, and the history of representations between Islamic and European societies.

In the fall semester, I taught “The History of the Moriscos: From the Iberian Peninsula to the Diaspora.” The course examined the history of the Moriscos, beginning with the Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula and the gradual formation of Morisco identity after forced conversion. It then explored the challenges Moriscos faced in preserving their cultural and religious identity in a predominantly Christian society, the expulsion of 1609–14, and the consequences of their diaspora, especially in North Africa. 
In the spring semester, I taught “Christians and Muslims in the Eyes of One Another in the Early Modern Period.” This course focused on the changing ways Christians and Muslims perceived, described, and imagined each other between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. We discussed themes such as hostility, curiosity, exoticism, captivity, diplomacy, travel, religious polemic, and life in frontier societies. The course paid particular attention to the historical and social contexts that shaped representations of the “other.”

I also taught “The West in Middle Eastern Eyes through Travel Literature.” This course examined Arab and Middle Eastern travel writing from the seventeenth to the twenty centuries, with a particular emphasis on Tunisian contributions. Through readings of travel accounts by ambassadors, intellectuals, reformers, and writers, students explored how the West was represented through Arab eyes and how encounters with Europe influenced debates about reform, modernity, identity, and cultural difference.

I greatly enjoyed teaching these courses, especially because of the rich and stimulating discussions with the students. I was happy to feel that, through these classes, I was able to open new perspectives for them and introduce them to different historical spaces, questions, and sources. This was especially clear in our class discussions and in their final papers, almost all of which showed a high level of critical thinking. For me, this is one of the central goals of the educational process.

I was also very pleased to co-advise, together with a colleague from the Department of the Classics, a senior thesis by an undergraduate student. The student produced an excellent comparative study of Arab and Byzantine civilizations in the early Islamic period. That experience was also very rewarding, because it allowed me to work closely with a student on a project that crossed disciplinary and regional boundaries.

How has Harvard, Cambridge, or the United States changed since you were last here? How has it not changed?

Harvard and Cambridge have certainly changed in some visible ways since 2017–18. On a lighter note, I must say that this time the weather felt much colder, and there was certainly much more snow than I remembered. More seriously, the city feels more expensive, and the rhythm of campus life has also been shaped by everything that happened during and after the pandemic. There is perhaps a stronger awareness now of uncertainty, and the need to rethink academic life in relation to the wider world.

Another important change is the growing presence of artificial intelligence and the challenges it brings to teaching and learning. This year, I felt very clearly that universities are entering a new moment in which we need to think carefully about how to use AI responsibly, how to preserve students’ critical thinking, and how to adapt our teaching methods without losing the essential human dimension of education. For me, this has been one of the most interesting and challenging questions of the year.

At the same time, many things have not changed. Harvard remains an extraordinary place for intellectual exchange. The libraries, seminars, conversations, and the density of scholars working on different parts of the world continue to make it a very stimulating environment. Cambridge also still has the same special atmosphere: a small city, but one where one constantly feels surrounded by ideas, books, students, and conversations. And, fortunately, Cambridge has preserved its beautiful greenery, which remains one of the things that makes living and working here so pleasant.

What have you most enjoyed about your year at Harvard and in Cambridge?

What I have most enjoyed is the combination of intellectual freedom and daily academic stimulation. Harvard gives you access not only to extraordinary libraries and resources, but also to people working on questions that can transform the way you think about your own research.

I have also greatly enjoyed the many opportunities for conversation and exchange, not only with Harvard faculty and students, but also with other visiting scholars from different universities. These encounters were especially valuable because they created a wider intellectual community around me and allowed me to discuss my work with colleagues coming from different academic traditions and perspectives.

Beyond that, I have enjoyed the rhythm of life in Cambridge: walking through Harvard Yard, spending time in libraries, attending talks, meeting colleagues and students, and feeling part of a larger scholarly community. For someone working on Mediterranean history from Tunisia, being here has been a wonderful opportunity to place my research in conversation with different fields, regions, and perspectives.

Was your family able to join you in the United States this year?

My family—my wife and my daughter—were not able to join me during most of the year. This was, without doubt, the most difficult part of the experience. Academic mobility can be very enriching, but it also requires sacrifices, and these sacrifices are often shared by the family.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my wife and express my deep gratitude to her for her support, patience, and understanding throughout this year. I am very happy that she and my daughter will be joining me at the beginning of June, so that we can spend the final part of my stay here together.

Do you have plans to travel in the United States or elsewhere before you return to Tunisia?

Yes. Before returning to Tunisia, I plan to do some research travel in the United States. In particular, I will conduct research in New York at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library and the New York Public Library, especially in rare books and Middle Eastern manuscript collections. These visits are directly connected to my current work on Moriscos, Sephardic Jews, and Mediterranean mobility.
I also hope to take the opportunity to see more of the United States with my family before returning home, especially places that are accessible from Cambridge.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I would simply add that returning to Harvard after having been the first Hazem Ben-Gacem Postdoctoral Fellow has been personally and professionally meaningful. That fellowship played an important role in my academic development, and coming back years later as a visiting professor feels like a continuation of that journey.

I am deeply grateful, first of all, to NELC for giving me the opportunity to return to Harvard as a Shawwaf Visiting Associate Professor this year, and to the administrative team there, who supported me at every stage and made my stay much smoother. Their help was invaluable. I am also very grateful to CMES and to everyone working there for their warm welcome. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the staff of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program for their support.

I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to my colleagues in NELC, who gave me the opportunity to be a visiting professor this year. I am particularly grateful to Malika Zeghal, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Shady Nasser, and to the many other colleagues with whom I had the pleasure and honor of collaborating, including Cemal Kafadar, Jessica Marglin, Adam Mestyan, Himmet Taşkömür, and others.

Finally, I would like to express my special thanks to my friend William Granara for his generosity and constant support, both during my previous stay at Harvard and this time as well. I am truly grateful for the intellectual and human community I have found here, and I hope that my presence has contributed, even modestly, to strengthening the place of North Africa, Tunisia, and the Maghrib within broader conversations about Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and global history.

I leave Harvard with deep gratitude, many good memories, and the hope that this will not be the last chapter of my relationship with this remarkable intellectual community.