Professor James McDougall
Associate Member
Research Interests
- Modern Middle Eastern and African history
- Global history of Islam since ca.1700
- Modern and contemporary France, the French empire in Africa, and its legacies
My research addresses several related thematic and geographical fields, mainly in the period since c. 1700: the modern and contemporary Mediterranean; Middle Eastern, African and Islamic history, especially Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, but also the history of European imperialism in the Arab world, modern Arab intellectual and political history, and the global history of Islam since c.1700; the French colonial empire in Africa; the Sahara; nationalism and revolutionary movements in Asia and Africa; comparative imperial history; historiography and critical theory.
My research interests are in Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, African, and modern Islamic history, especially modern and contemporary North Africa; and modern France and the French colonial empire (18th-20th cents.). My first work focused on the intersection of Islamic modernism and nationalist politics in colonial Algeria, and I continue to work on colonial and contemporary North African, and especially Algerian, history and politics. I also have a broader interest in the social, political, and intellectual history of the Arab world, and especially in Arabic/Islamic conceptions of history. Since 2008, I have been involved in a series of workshops on Arabic historiography, 'Arabic Pasts', organised in partnership with colleagues at SOAS and the Aga Khan University-Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London. My current research is divided between two projects, one on 'the everyday life of colonialism' and the aftereffects of empire in France and Africa, and another on the global history of Islam since the eighteenth century. I am also interested in historical methodology, the intersections of history and critical theory, and comparative historiography. I have been involved in several international research networks, on 'Repression and Control in the Colonial World' (IHTP, Paris), 'Reform and the State in the Muslim Mediterranean, 19th-20th centuries' (IRMC, Tunis), 'Tradition in the Present' (KCL), and 'Reimagining Democracy in the Mediterranean, 1750-1860' (Oxford).
James McDougall is on twitter: @jamesrmcd
http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research-centres/middle-east-centre
