Adam Mestyan researches and teaches the history of empire and subordinated states in the Arabic-speaking world. His research projects include natural history and Islamic law, urban history, the history of taxation, and Arab state formation (especially federations) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Currently, he is writing an environmental history of Cairo.
He is associate professor in the History Department of Duke University and a graduate of CEU and ELTE (Budapest). He taught at Oxford University and subsequently was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His works in cultural and political history include Modern Arab Kingship – Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023), Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Ifao, 2021); and Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2017).
(Istanbul, May 2022)