Philip S. Khoury

Philip S. Khoury is Associate Provost and Ford International Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Khoury was born on October 15, 1949, in Washington, D.C. to Shukry E. Khoury, Esq. (1904-1985), an attorney, and Dr. Angela Jurdak Khoury (1915-), a diplomat and educator from Lebanon. He was educated at the Sidwell Friends School (1953-1967) in Washington and then at Trinity College (BA, 1971) and Harvard University (PhD, 1980). In 1981, he joined MIT as an assistant professor of history, rising to the rank of professor in 1990.

Khoury's career in academic administration began in 1987 when he was appointed associate dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Then, in 1991, he became dean of the school, a position he held for fifteen years. During his deanship, he helped to maintain the national leadership of his school's five doctoral programs, introduced new master's programs in Comparative Media Studies and Science Writing, expanded its Asian studies faculty, and raised considerable new endowment. In 2002, he was appointed the first Kenan Sahin Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT. He left the dean's office in 2006 to become associate provost responsible for overseeing MIT’s non-curricular arts programs and initiatives, including the MIT Museum and the List Visual Arts Center, strategic planning for international education and research, and the promotion of the public understanding of science and technology.

Khoury is a political and social historian of the Middle East. He is the author of many publications including Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Syria and the French Mandate (Princeton University Press, 1987), which received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor of Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (University of California Press, 1991); Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-war Reconstruction (Brill, 1993); and The Modern Middle East: A Reader (I.B. Tauris, 1993, 2004). He is currently conducting research on war and society in the Middle East during World War II.

In 1998, Khoury was elected President of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and in 2002 to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is Chairman of the World Peace Foundation, Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American University of Beirut, and a trustee of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, Trinity College, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He is also on the Board of Overseers of Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. He was a director of the Harvard Cooperative Society between 1998 and 2003.

Khoury has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and Thomas J. Watson Foundation. He has been a Visiting Associate of St. Antony's College in the University of Oxford and a Faculty Associate of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.