Dr Henry Clements

I am a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East with interests in religion, sectarianism, and the emergence of secularism in the late Ottoman world. A Junior Research Fellow in History at Jesus College, I am working as a Research Associate on the ERC-funded project "Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East," based in the Faculty of History.

Research Interests

• Middle East and Ottoman History
• Modern Intellectual History
• History of Religion and Secularism

My research centers on the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Middle East, focusing in particular on the emergence of secular forms of thought and political organization. I am interested in how the rise of secularism—understood both as a way of organizing society and politics and also as a set of ideas about time, nature, religion, and authority—has fundamentally reordered the modern world.

In my current book project, Ottoman Secularism: History and Difference in the Nineteenth Century, I draw on a unique set of communal sources to explore how one minority community negotiated the secularizing transformations of the late Ottoman Empire. This work has led me to pursue related theoretical projects on history, modernity, and the West, as well as historical investigations into modern Arabic and Turkish treatments of the histories of Islam and Christianity.