Leila Fawaz

Leila Fawaz is Professor Emerita of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School and of History in the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. She was the founding director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. Fawaz was named a Chevalier in the French National Order of the Legion of Honor in 2012. She has served as President of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and on committees for the American Historical Association, Carnegie, and the Comité Scientifique de la Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme at the Université d’Aix-Marseille. She continues to serve on several governing boards at Harvard, including the visiting committee for the Harvard Divinity School. She was named a Carnegie Scholar from 2008 to 2010 and has held editorial board positions with the American Historical Review, British Journal of Middle East Studies, and International Journal of Middle East Studies. Fawaz was recently honored with Tufts University’s Provost’s Medal (2024), 2020 Harvard Medal, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Harvard Alumni Association and a distinguished alumni award from the American University of Beirut. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Among her publications are A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War (Harvard University Press, 2014); Transformed Landscapes: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East in Honor of Walid Khalidi (Co-editor with Camille Mansour, American University of Cairo Press, 2009); Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean (Co-editor with C. A. Bayly, Columbia University Press, 2002); An Occasion for War: Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (University of California Press, 1994); State and Society in Lebanon (Editor, Centre for Lebanese Studies at Oxford, 1991); and Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth Century Beirut (Harvard University Press, 1983). Fawaz received a PhD in history from Harvard University. She continues to research the experiences of individuals during and after World War I in the Middle East and North Africa.