Roger Owen to retire from teaching to focus solely on research
Students in HIST-1891 “Understanding the Middle East since 1945: The Basic Socio-Economic and Political Structures” and HIST 78a “The Middle East during the First Wave of Modern Globalization 1870-1925” this semester will be the last at Harvard to benefit from Professor Roger Owen’s wisdom and insights about the modern Middle East in a classroom setting.
Professor Owen will retire from his teaching after the Fall 2011 semester to focus on his current writing projects and research interests, which include the rise and fall of Arab “presidents for life,” constitutional and electoral changes stemming from with the “Arab Spring,” and the history of the Middle East's informal institutions.
A British historian, Roger Owen has authored several classic works on the history of the modern Middle East including State, Power, and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Routledge, 2004), A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century, with Şevket Pamuk (Harvard University Press, 1999), The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (Routledge, 1987), and Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford University Press, 2004). His research interests include the economic history of the Middle East, especially Egypt, from 1800 to the present, as well as the political and socioeconomic history of the region since 1880.
Owen is currently the A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History at Harvard University and from 1996 to 1999 served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.. He has advised scores of PhD students in the Center’s joint PhD program in History and Middle Eastern Studies, and many more in the History Department. Professor Owen has served on the CMES Steering Committee for the past 18 years, and has been an integral part of the Center’s academic community. CMES Associate Director Susan Kahn notes, "It is difficult to quantify Roger Owen's myriad contributions to CMES over the past 20 years. He has been the guiding light of Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, an invaluable mentor to students, colleagues and staff, and a stalwart pillar of all Center activities."
Prior to teaching at Harvard, Professor Owen was a faculty member at Oxford University, where he served several times as the director of the St Antony’s College Middle East Centre. In addition to his teaching and scholarship, Owen frequently writes columns for the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat.
He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies in 2009 and the prestigious “Award for Outstanding Contributions to Middle Eastern Studies 2010” from the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) in Barcelona in July 2010. Owen has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the American University at Cairo that same year. He is an emeritus fellow of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.