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Faculty Cyrus Schayegh PhD, Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University I became fascinated with the modern Middle East in high school in Switzerland. The turmoil of the region seemed to my teenage self to be the perfect antidote to the tranquil atmosphere of my native country. Determined to get as much exposure to the contemporary Middle East as possible and a solid education to boot, I enrolled in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I earned a BA in 1996. I then returned to Switzerland, where I received a DES in Political Science from Geneva University and, in 1997, moved on to Columbia University, where I earned my PhD (MEALAC) in early 2004. In my dissertation, I tried to combine social history and the history of colonial science. Now a book, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong. Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900-1950 tells two intertwined stories: how, in early twentieth-century Iran, an emerging middle class used modern scientific knowledge as its cultural and economic capital, and how, along with the state, it employed biomedical sciences to tackle presumably modern problems like the increasing stress of everyday life, people's defective willpower, and demographic stagnation. Determined to spend more time in Iran than the occasional short research trip, I moved to Tehran after defending my PhD, and stayed until summer 2005. I moonlighted as a journalist for Swiss newspapers; had a fascinating (and sleepless) experience trying to help organize, as temporary employee of the International Organization of Migration, the out-of-country leg of the January 2005 Iraqi parliamentary elections in the Iranian province of Khuzestan; and, as a post-doctoral fellow at the Tehran Institute for Management and Planning Studies, initiated a project on the rise of technopolitics under the Pahlavi monarchy. In fall 2005, I started working as assistant professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the American University of Beirut. Lebanon was a strategic choice: while maintaining my interest in modern Iranian history, I wanted to branch out and start doing research also on the Arab world. Before long, perhaps also because of the underlying tension between ‘my’ Lebanese present and the years I had spent in Israel/Palestine, I became interested in the post-Ottoman past of the Levant also as a region rather than simply as a collection of countries. In my principal current project, hopefully my next book, I am re-thinking the interwar Levant as an area formed by the interplay between new states and cross-border movements of goods and people. I am trying to get a handle on this broad theme by examining smuggling – a completely overlooked, though very pervasive and complex phenomenon across and beyond the new Mandate states. I had the fortune of joining NES in fall 2008, and have started to teach courses in three main areas: the social history of the modern Middle East, and more particularly of the Levant; the history of Arab-Israeli relations, especially during the British Mandate; and modern Iran. Selected professional activities: Review editor, Iranian Studies Selected awards / scholarships:
Selected publications
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