Dr Joseph Leidy

I am a social and cultural historian of the modern Arab East. My research on Lebanon, Syria, and their diasporas explores middle-class political ideas and practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I received my PhD in History from Brown University in 2023 and my MA in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. Previously, I was a teaching fellow in Global Islamic Studies at Connecticut College. I am currently a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East project.

Research Interests

My broad interest is in modern middle-class representations of popular, mass, and democratic politics in the global Middle East. I have sought to contextualize these in historical processes that exceed nationalism and the nation-state as principles of political community by taking a chronologically and geographically broad approach. My doctoral research traced the emergence of youth as a political category from nineteenth-century Ottoman Mt. Lebanon to twentieth-century French Mandate Lebanon. At Oxford, I am a member of the Moving Stories team researching religious belief and belonging in the global Middle East with a particular focus on the mahjar, or Arabic-speaking diaspora in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americas.