Adam Mestyan researches and teaches the history of empire and subordinated states in the Arabic-speaking world, with a new focus on agriculture. Currently, he is undertaking research for his third monograph, a history of fiscal sovereignty in modern Egypt and Syria. He is interested in all aspects of global agricultural history, including agrarian shari’a, bureaucracy, urban agriculture, food processing chains, and war.
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 previous works in cultural and political history include Modern Arab Kingship (Princeton University Press, forthcoming in 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 runs a marathon every year.
(June 2021)