Dr Joseph Leidy
Bennett Boskey Fellow in Modern Global History
Exeter College
I am a social and cultural historian of the Middle East with a focus on Lebanon, Syria, and their diasporas in the Americas. Originally from Burlington, Vermont, I studied at Williams College and the University of Texas at Austin before completing my PhD at Brown University in 2022. I was also a teaching fellow in Global Islamic Studies at Connecticut College. I first came to Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher with the Moving Stories project before joining Exeter College as the Boskey Fellow in Modern Global History.
Research Interests
My research explores middle-class political life in Lebanon, Syria, and their diasporas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have been particularly interested in how the burgeoning middle classes of the region thought about popular, mass, and democratic politics in dialogue with global patterns of social mobility and intellectual exchange, and not strictly via the nation-state as a principle of political representation. In that vein, my book project traces the emergence of youth as a political category from ‘chiefs of young men’ in nineteenth-century Ottoman Mt. Lebanon to youth volunteer clubs in interwar French Mandate Lebanon. However, I’m also interested in a variety of approaches to the global Middle East, having recently delved into the histories of a peripatetic Syriac Catholic priest and Lebanese immigrants in early twentieth-century Massachusetts, amongst others.
