In this talk, Heather J. Sharkey will examine the history of relations among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the pre-World War I, Ottoman Middle East. She will assess the role that religion played – and did not play – in shaping individual and group identities, and in propelling events. At the same time, reflecting on issues of method – namely, on how we tell a history like this one and for whom we try to tell it – she will discuss the use of material and sensory culture to study how people mingled in everyday life.
Heather J. Sharkey is a Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches classes on Middle Eastern, North African, and Islamic history, and where she won the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. Before joining Penn’s faculty, she taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Trinity College in Connecticut. In 2012, she was a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She holds degrees from Yale University (Anthropology, BA, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), the University of Durham, England (Middle Eastern Studies, MPhil), and Princeton University (History, PhD). She has received many fellowships, including the Marshall, Fulbright-Hays, and Carnegie. She is the author of Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press, 2003); American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton University Press, 2008); American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters (editor, with Mehmet Ali Doğan; University of Utah Press, 2011); and Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia (editor, Syracuse University Press, 2013). Her most recent book, A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East, appeared from Cambridge University Press in 2017.
Cost : Free and open to the public.
cnes@international.ucla.edu Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies