Philip S. Khoury

Philip S. Khoury is a political and social historian of the Middle East, presently 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. the son of a naturalized American lawyer and a Lebanese diplomat and educator. He was educated at the Sidwell Friends School (1953-1967) in Washington and then at the American University of Beirut, 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.

From 1991-2006, Khoury served as Dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. During his deanship, he helped to maintain the national leadership of his school's doctoral programs, introduced new master's programs in Comparative Media Studies and Science Writing, expanded its international studies faculty and programs, 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, the promotion of the public understanding of science and technology, and the OpenCourseWare Publishing Initiative.

Khoury established in 1985, and has chaired ever since, the Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar, an MIT forum focused on contemporary Middle Eastern affairs. He also co-founded in 1986 and chaired until 2006, the John E. Burchard Scholars Program, MIT's undergraduate society of fellows in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

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.

Other positions:

• 1998; elected President of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA)
• 2002; elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• 2008; elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Chairman of the World Peace Foundation, 2004-- (Trustee since 1999)
• Vice Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the American University of Beirut, 2005-- (Trustee since 1997)
• Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Trinity College (Hartford CT), 2007-- (Trustee since 2000)

Khoury is also a trustee of:

• the Toynbee Prize Foundation, 1997--
• the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2006--
• the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina., 2007--

• Board of Overseers of Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. , 2006--
• Director of the Harvard Cooperative Society between 1998 and 2003.

Publications (partial list):

• Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1983, 2003) ISBN 0521533236;
• Syria and the French Mandate (Princeton University Press, 1987), ISBN 069105486X, received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association.

Khoury is co-editor of:

• Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (University of California Press, 1991) ISBN 0-520-07080-1;
• Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-war Reconstruction (Brill, 1993), ISBN 9789004099111;
• The Modern Middle East: A Reader (I.B. Tauris, 1993, 2004), ISBN 0520082419;