Leila Fawaz is Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies and Founding Director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. Between 1996 and 2001, she was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Jackson College, and Associate Dean of the Faculty. Fawaz also served as chair of the Department History at Tufts University. She holds a dual appointment as Professor of Diplomacy at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Professor of History at Tufts University.

Fawaz has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and of the AANA, the Alumni Association in North America of the American University of Beirut. As president of the AANA, she also served as ex-officio trustee on the American University of Beirut Board of Trustees. Her editorial posts have included the positions of general editor of the book series “History and Society of the Modern Middle East” at Columbia University Press, editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), and editorial board positions with the American Historical Review, IJMES, the British Middle East Studies Association Review, and others.

Fawaz serves on the Governing Boards of Harvard University as an Overseer, and is a Carnegie Scholar (2008-10), a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Comité Scientifique of the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l'Homme at the Université de Provence. She has served on the Advisory Board of the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and chaired the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars Fulbright Review Committee. At various times, she also served on committees of the Social Science Research Council, the Steering Committee of the European Science Foundation, and as delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies. She also was Visiting Scholar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Politiques et Sociales, Paris, and Visiting Professor at the University of Provence, Aix-en-Provence.

Fawaz received a B.A. and M.A. in history from the American University of Beirut (in 1967 and 1968, respectively), and an A.M. and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1979. Her research interests include the social and political history of the modern Middle East, including the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Her publications include Transformed Landscapes: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East in Honor of Walid Khalidi (co-editor, 2009); Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (co-editor, 2002); An Occasion for War: Ethnic Conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (1994); and Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (1983). As Carnegie Scholar, Fawaz will work next on a study “The Experience of War: Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia, 1914-1920.”

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