Adam Mestyan is a historian of the modern Arab world. At present, he is Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Middle East Studies Center and the Islamic Studies Center at Duke University. He has also been the recipient of many fellowships and awards including a junior fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and a membership in the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton).
His research focuses on modern Syria and Egypt. His monographs 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). He is the PI of the collaborative Arabic digital humanities project, Digital Cairo – Studying Urban Transformation through a TEI XML Database, 1828-1914, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and L’Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire (Ifao).
(Egyptian National Archives, Cairo, June 2024)