Summary
Alan Mikhail is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. He is a historian of the early modern Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt whose research and teaching focus mostly on the nature of early modern imperial rule, peasant histories, environmental resource management, and science and medicine. Professor Mikhail received his Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation won the Malcolm H. Kerr Award from the Middle East Studies Association and the James H. Kettner Award from the University of California, Berkeley. From 2008 to 2010, he was a member of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University. His first book, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, Studies in Environment and History, 2011), examines Ottoman history through the lens of water usage and environmental resource management in the empire’s most lucrative province of Egypt. He is currently also editing a collection of essays on the environmental history of the early modern and modern Middle East (under contract with Oxford University Press). His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and in other journals and edited collections. Professor Mikhail is currently beginning a new book-length project on the history of human-animal relations in Ottoman Egypt and also several smaller projects on various environmental topics in the early modern Middle East, Ottoman bureaucratic practice, and the history of coffee in the Ottoman Empire. His research has been supported by the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Institute of Turkish Studies.
Alan Mikhail is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. He is a historian of the early modern Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt whose research and teaching focus mostly on the nature of early modern imperial rule, peasant histories, environmental resource management, and science and medicine. Professor Mikhail received his Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation won the Malcolm H. Kerr Award from the Middle East Studies Association and the James H. Kettner Award from the University of California, Berkeley. From 2008 to 2010, he was a member of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University. His first book, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, Studies in Environment and History, 2011), examines Ottoman history through the lens of water usage and environmental resource management in the empire’s most lucrative province of Egypt. He is currently also editing a collection of essays on the environmental history of the early modern and modern Middle East (under contract with Oxford University Press). His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and in other journals and edited collections. Professor Mikhail is currently beginning a new book-length project on the history of human-animal relations in Ottoman Egypt and also several smaller projects on various environmental topics in the early modern Middle East, Ottoman bureaucratic practice, and the history of coffee in the Ottoman Empire. His research has been supported by the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Institute of Turkish Studies.
Current Institution | Yale University |
Department | History |
Disciplines | |
Address | HGS 300-F New Haven Connecticut 06520 United States Phone: (203) 432-1353 |
Profile viewed 4733 times
University of California, Berkeley
PhD,
History
(2008)
University of California, Berkeley
MA,
History
(2003)
- Andrew W. Mellon Grant (2007)
- Institute of Turkish Studies Grant (2005)
Publication Summary
Select Publications
Books
- Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History. Studies in Environment and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- ed., Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Under Contract.
Articles
- “Global Implications of the Middle Eastern Environment.” History Compass 9 (2011). Forthcoming.
- “An Irrigated Empire: The View from Ottoman Fayyum.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 569-90.
- “Animals as Property in Early Modern Ottoman Egypt.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53 (2010): 621-52.
- “The Nature of Plague in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (2008): 249-75.
- “From the Bottom Up: The Nile, Dirt, and Humans in Ottoman Egypt.” In Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East: History, Policy, Power, and Practice, edited by Edmund Burke III and Diana K. Davis. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011.
- “The Middle East in Global Environmental History.” In A Companion to Global Environmental History, edited by J.R. McNeill and E.C. Stewart. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Forthcoming.
- “al-Ḥayāh bayna al-Mumārasa al-Ijtimā‘īyya wa al-Ḥajr al-Ṣiḥḥī li-Muḥammad ‘Alī” [Life between Social Practice and Muhammad’s ‘Ali’s Quarantine]. In ‘Aṣr Muḥammad ‘Alī [The Reign of Muhammad ‘Ali]. Cairo: al-Majlis al-A‘lā lil-Thaqāfa. Forthcoming.
- “Tārīkh Dirāsāt al-Tābi‘ wa Naẓariyyatayn ‘an al-Sulṭa” [Subaltern Studies and Two Theories of Power]. In Thaqāfat al-Nukhba wa Thaqāfat al-‘Āmma fī Miṣr fī al-‘Aṣr al-‘Uthmānī [Elite and Popular Culture in Egypt in the Ottoman Period], edited by Nāṣir Aḥmad Ibrāhīm. Cairo: Markaz al-Buḥūth wa al-Dirāsāt al-Ijtimā‘iyya, 2008.
- “The Heart’s Desire: Gender, Urban Space and the Ottoman Coffee House.” In Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Dana Sajdi. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.
- Co-Authored with Gretchen Head. “Dirāsat al-Tābi‘: I‘ādat Kitābat al-Tārīkh” [Subaltern Studies: The Rewriting of History]. Akhbār al-Adab 587 (10 October 2004).
- “al-Qāmūs wa al-Istishrāq” [The Lexicon and Orientalism]. Wijhāt Naẓar 6, no. 66 (July 2004).
- Co-Authored with Joel E. Boyd, Ari Briskman, Vicki Colvin, and Daniel Mittleman. “Size-Dependent Dielectric Properties of Liquid Water Clusters.” In Liquid Dynamics: Experiment, Simulation, and Theory, edited by John T. Fourkas. Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 2002.
Reviews
- Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). International Journal of Middle East Studies 41: 3 (August 2009).
- Carlos E. Cordova, Millennial Landscape Change in Jordan: Geoarchaeology and Cultural Ecology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007). Agricultural History 83: 1 (Winter 2009).
- Jane Hathaway, A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (Spring 2007).
- Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Arab Studies Journal 14: 2/ 15: 1 (Fall 2006/ Spring 2007).
- Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 40: 2 (Winter 2006).
- Nelly Hanna, In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 40: 2 (Winter 2006).
- Stuart J. Borsch, The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2005). al-Waqā’i‘ al-Miṣrīyya (Fall 2006).
- Amy J. Johnson, Reconstructing Rural Egypt: Ahmed Hussein and the History of Egyptian Development (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004). Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 3:3 (Winter 2005).
Books
Other Publications