Joshua Donovan is an interdisciplinary historian of the modern Middle East whose work situates the region and its people in a wider global perspective. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of global history at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. in Middle East History from Columbia University and a Masters in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. He was first drawn to Middle Eastern studies as an undergraduate at Georgetown University – particularly its Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Broadly speaking, his work explores the intersections of religion, migration, social movements, and human rights in the Ottoman, colonial, and postcolonial Middle East.
His current book project, Imagining Antioch: Sectarianism, Nationalism, and Migration in the Greek Orthodox Levant, tells a new history of Syria and Lebanon’s Greek Orthodox Christian community from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Donovan’s scholarship has appeared in Mashriq & Mahjar, Journal of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Journal of World Christianity, H-Diplo, and more. He is also co-editing a special journal issue on knowledge production and forced migration in the Middle East and Europe and has contributed a chapter to a volume on US foreign policy in the Middle East, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Before coming to Boston College, Donovan was a postdoctoral fellow in the history of migration at the German Historical Institute’s Pacific Office at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught seminars in religious and political thought as a Core Preceptor at Columbia University. His research has been supported by the Max Weber Stiftung; the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies; Columbia’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, and others.
