Adam Mestyan

Research interests: Modern Middle Eastern History (Ottoman and Post-Ottoman); Social and Cultural History; Historical Anthropology; Empire/Law

Adam Mestyan is a historian of the modern Middle East and the Ford Foundation Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on how globalization and war have shaped Arab societies and cultures—especially Egypt, Syria, and the Red Sea region—from the late Ottoman Empire to today. He is the author of Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton, 2023); Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Ifao, 2021); and Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton, 2017).

His current research interests include the new imperial history of the twentieth-century Middle East and Arabic cultures of economic life (environment and business). He is also engaged in Islamic/Arabic digital humanities projects using TEI XML, such as a digital textual database on nineteenth-century Cairo’s urban history or a chronology of Arabic periodicals, 1800-1929. Other areas of interest are the urban and cultural history of the Middle East (including print and theatre history), history of Eastern Europe-Middle East relations, and the history of academic Orientalism. His research has been supported by many grants and fellowships, including a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a junior fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows (JF’16), a fellowship in the IEA de Paris, and a membership in the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). He was also elected as a Foreign Research Fellow (membre scientifique à titre étranger) at the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (Ifao) in Cairo, Egypt. Prior to joining Harvard in 2025, he taught for nine years at Duke University. For further details and a full list of publications see his website.

Select publications:

• “Microhistory As Industrial History – Climate, Sugar Capitalism, and Labour in Egypt, 1863-1879." Past & Present 268, 1 (2025): 143-180.
• Modern Arab Kingship – The Remaking of the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023)
• “From Administrative to Political Order? Global Legal History, the Organic Law, and the Constitution of Mandate Syria, 1925–1930.” Journal of Global History 17, 2 (2022): 292–311
• “Muslim Dualism? – Inter-Imperial History and Austria-Hungary in Ottoman Political Thought, 1867–1921.” Contemporary European History 30, 4 (2021): 478–496
• “Seeing Like a Khedivate: Taxing Endowed Agricultural Land, Proofs of Ownership, and the Land Administration in Egypt, 1869.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, no. 5–6 (2020): 743–87.
• Arab Patriotism – The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)
• “Arabic Theatre in Early Khedivial Culture, 1868-1872: James Sanua Revisited.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, 1 (2014): 117-137.