February 2022

In this interview, CBRL’s Director Carol Palmer speaks to Andrew Arsan about his research on the twentieth century history of the Levant with a focus on the potential for Arab democracy.

About the speaker:
Andrew Arsan is Professor of Arab and Mediterranean History in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College. A political, cultural, and intellectual historian of the modern Middle East, he is the author of Lebanon: A Country in Fragments (2018) and Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial West Africa (2014), and the editor, with Cyrus Schayegh, of the Routledge Handbook of the History of the History of the Middle East Mandates (2015). He is currently working on a new history of political thought and action in the twentieth-century Arab world, for publication with Allen Lane and Basic Books.