NES Faculty

Benjamin Thomas White
Postdoctoral Research Associate

email: nes@princeton.edu

A graduate of the University of Edinburgh with first class honours in Arabic, White earned his D.Phil. in modern history at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in 2008. His dissertation, “The Nation-State Form and the Emergence of ‘Minorities’ in French Mandate Syria, 1919-1939”, studies the conditions that allowed the concept of ‘minority’ to become prominent in Syria c. 1930 and argues that this occurred because of the development of the nation-state form. At Princeton, White plans to develop a growing interest in the processes of exclusion that are an integral part of state-building in modern nation-states through a project on statelessness in the interwar Levant, including areas under British and French mandate as well as the independent nation-state of the Turkish Republic.