Adam Mestyan — Historian of the Modern Middle East

Adam Mestyan

I study the history of the modern Middle East, particularly the Arab provinces of the late Ottoman Empire and its successor states. My current research examines how globalization and war interacted to shape state formation and economic life in the post-Ottoman regions, especially in Egypt and Syria. At Harvard University, I teach at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations as Ford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies. I am on sabbatical leave in AY 2026–2027 as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Professor at Sciences Po, Paris.

About

Hello, I am a historian of the modern Middle East and a retired bass guitarist of a shaman punk band in Eastern Europe. Once I was also a poet. A graduate of ELTE and CEU (Budapest), I have taught at Oxford University, Duke University, and now at Harvard University.

I was born and raised in Hungary, from a family that is itself a mix of German, Hungarian, and Slavic backgrounds — and, further back, a great-great-grandmother from Greece, which is about as close as my own family tree gets to the Middle East.

Books

Princeton University Press · 2023

Modern Arab Kingship

Remaking the Ottoman political order in the interwar Middle East.

Ifao · 2021

Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo

A microhistory of a forgotten Egyptian intellectual and poet, Muṣṭafā Salāma al-Naǧǧārī.

Princeton University Press · 2017

Arab Patriotism

The ideology and culture of power in late Ottoman Egypt.

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