Alan Mikhail

Alan Mikhail (born 1979) is an American historian who is a professor of history at Yale University. His work centers on the history of the Ottoman Empire.

Education and career

Mikhail graduated in History and Chemistry from Rice University in 2001, and received his MA in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. His PhD was conferred from the same university in 2008. His thesis The Nature of Ottoman Egypt: Irrigation, Environment, and Bureaucracy in the Long Eighteenth Century was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences (2009) by Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).

He served as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University for two years, before becoming an assistant professor of history at Yale University in 2010. In 2013, he was promoted to full professor and became department chair in 2018.

Publications

• God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2020)
• Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
• The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• ed., Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Honors

In 2018, he received the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

External links

• Official website
• Yale faculty page