Roger Owen (historian)

Roger Owen
Born (1935-05-27) May 27, 1935
London
Residence United States
Nationality British
Education BA (1959), PhD (1964)
Occupation Historian, A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History, Harvard University, 1993-
Employer Harvard, Director of Center for Middle Eastern Studies 1996-99
Website Harvard History Department - Faculty Emeriti

Edward Roger John Owen (born 1935) is a British historian who has written several classic works on the history of the modern Middle East. His research interests include the economic, social and political history of the Middle East, especially Egypt, from 1800 to the present, as well as the theories of imperialism, including military occupations.

Biography

He read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Magdalen College, the University of Oxford, from 1956 to 1959, followed by a D Phil in Economic History at St. Antony's College, from 1960 to 1964. One of his close advisers was the renowned Middle East historian Albert Hourani. His thesis which was on the cotton production and the development of the economy in nineteenth century Egypt was later published into a book.

When in the 1960s new postgraduate course in modern Middle Eastern studies were introduced at St Anthony's College and a raft of new posts created with British government funding, Owen was appointed in Economic and Social History in 1964. He served as Director of St. Antony's College Middle East Centre, from 1971-4, 1980-2, 1986-8, and 1991-3.

He is currently the A.J. Meyer Professor Emeritus of Middle East History at Harvard University and was previously the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES).

In addition to his teaching and scholarship, Owen frequently writes columns for the English-language versions of the Arabic newspapers Al-Hayat and Al-Ahram.

He is a member of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, also known as MESA.

Awards and Honors

In 2007 he received a Doctorate in Humane Letters from the American University of Cairo.

In July 2010, he received the prestigious “Award for Outstanding Contributions to Middle Eastern Studies 2010” from the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) in Barcelona.

In 2012, he received the Giorgio Levi Della Vida medal for Excellence in Islamic studies, Von Grunebaum Center UCLA.[1]

Selected works

References

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