Yale’s Alan Mikhail to launch “Middle East Environmental Histories” book series

March 17, 2023

Yale University professor Alan Mikhail, an acclaimed author and scholar in Middle Eastern and environmental history and chair of Yale’s Department of History, will spearhead a new book series, “Middle East Environmental Histories.”  The series, which will be published by Leiden University Press, will seek out the best new work on the environmental history of the Middle East from late antiquity to the present, highlighting the ways in which peoples in the Middle East engaged with their environments to produce ideas, states, cultures, literatures, families, and societies. Middle East Environmental Histories will place the region in a more global context while keeping an interdisciplinary focus on the particularities of its environment—its historic role at the crossroads of trade between the Mediterranean and Asia, its cultural and religious diversity, Islam, and modern oil industries.

Mikhail is the author of four books and over thirty scholarly articles that have received multiple awards in the fields of Middle Eastern and environmental history, including the Fuat Köprülü Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association for Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History and the Roger Owen Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association for Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental HistoryHis latest book is God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern WorldIn 2018, he received the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for internationally distinguished humanities scholars and social scientists.
 

Series editor:

Alan Mikhail, Yale University

Series Board:                                   

Maaike van Berkel, Radboud University, Netherlands

Amina Elbendary, American University of Cairo

Faisal Husain, Pennsylvania State University

Onur Inal, University of Vienna

Michael Christopher Low, University of Utah

Zozan Pehlivan, University of Minnesota                                             

Caterina Scaramelli, Boston University

Sarra Tlili, University of Florida