Beshara Doumani's research focuses on the history of social groups, places, and time periods that have been silenced or erased by conventional scholarship on the early modern and modern Middle East. He contributes to the fields of social history, family history, and history of the Palestinians. Most of his writing is based on locally generated sources, especially registers of Ottoman shari`a (Islamic law) courts and family papers. 

In writings about Islam, women, and modernity in the Middle East, family and religion are frequently invoked but rarely historicized. In his most recent book, Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History, which is based on a wide range of local sources, Doumani argues that there is no such thing as the Muslim or Arab family type that is so central to Orientalist, nationalist, and Islamist narratives. Rather, one finds dramatic regional differences, even within the same cultural zone, in the ways that family was understood, organized, and reproduced. In his comparative examination of the property devolution strategies and gender regimes in the context of local political economies, Doumani offers a groundbreaking examination of ordinary people and how they shaped the modern Middle East.

Doumani's first book, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, tells an intimate story about the transformation of Palestinian society during the Ottoman period.  Doumani is also editor of Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property and Gender; and of Academic Freedom After September 11.

Doumani also writes and teaches on displacement as a global and historically enduring phenomenon; as an ecological and technological phenomenon; and as a discursive field.

 

Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History. Cambridge University Press: 2017.

Academic Freedom After September 11 (editor). Zone Books: 2006.

Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property and Gender. SUNY Press: 2003.

Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900. University of California Press: 1995.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $175,000 for a Sawyer seminar, “Displacement and the Making of the Modern World: Histories, Ecologies, and Subjectivities,” organized by Beshara Doumani. The award provides resources for post-graduate research fellowships, three workshops, and a seminar series.  Through a yearlong series of workshops, seminars, courses, and cultural activities, “Displacement and the Making of the Modern World” will explore three broad themes that integrate disparate studies of displacement: as a global and historically enduring phenomenon; as an ecological and technological phenomenon; and as a discursive field.

Department of History

Middle East Studies