Departmental homepageBorn in Beirut, Professor Arsan has lived in Lebanon, France, Britain and the USA. A graduate of St John's, he held positions at Birkbeck and Princeton Universities before returning to Cambridge in 2012 and taking up his current position the following year.
Professor Arsan teaches a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in Middle Eastern and world history. At the undergraduate level, he convenes a popular third-year course on the Arab world, Middle Eastern modernities, as well as two first-year (Part IA) papers: the 20th-century world, and Arab intellectual history, c.1856-1967. For graduates, he is the lead convenor of the world history MPhil core course. At St John's, he teaches the historical thinking paper across all three years of the undergraduate degree.
Professor Arsan is a historian of the Arab world, with a particular interest in the region's cultural, political and intellectual history; European imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa; and diaspora and the transregional movement of people and ideas. The author of two books on Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora, he has also published a number of articles on Arab political thought and the history of Middle Eastern migration. His latest book, forthcoming in 2025, offers a wide-ranging reinterpretation of the political and intellectual history of the 20th-century Arab world, from Morocco to the Gulf, and from the First World War to the 2011 Arab uprisings.
Sentenced to Hope: Freedom, Revolution, War and the Arab 20th Century (New York and London: Basic Books and Allen Lane, forthcoming)
Lebanon: A Country in Fragments (London and New York: Hurst, 2018; updated paperback edition, February 2020)
Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (London and New York: Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2014), Joint Winner, 2014 Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize
Co-edited with Cyrus Schayegh, The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle Eastern Mandates (London: Routledge, 2015)
