Nadia Al-Bagdadi

She is a historian of modern Islamic history, thought, literature, and culture. During her initial training at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where she later taught, she also studied for extended periods in Cairo and briefly in Tunis. Her subsequent research and teaching took her to numerous locations across Europe, North America, and the Middle East, but it was her years in Beirut, at the American University and in other research contexts, that decisively shaped her formation and research before joining CEU.

Her research interests are deeply anchored in Arab nineteenth-century history and its place in universal—or, in contemporary terms, global—history. She began with a study on cultural and intellectual transformations in Egypt, as expressed in the emergence of new genres of writing and the nahda movement (the Arab Renaissance). She then moved toward examining in depth the actors, structures, and relationships of what she terms Late Ottoman Modernity and Muslim Reformism in the Arab East. Two intertwined research streams have since marked her work: the tension between the secular and the religious as it manifests in the formation of new socio-cultural and intellectual trajectories, and the late emergence of print culture with its Eastern Mediterranean specificities. Her current book project explores these developments through the life and thought of the polymath, writer, and printer Faris Ahmad al-Shidyaq (to appear with Edinburgh University Press). Another recent project investigates the entangled connections of European and Arab religious and intellectual borders, focusing on the roles of religion, scholarship, and modernity between Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean.

Although not directly connected to these projects, over the years she has also published on gender-related issues—from her first publication, an introduction to a volume on Iraqi female exiles, to a recent chapter on the emergence of new moral and sexual taboos in the mid-nineteenth century. She is increasingly engaging with questions of gender, religion, and modernity in the nineteenth-century Middle East.

Her teaching and thesis supervision at the Department of Historical Studies reflect both her research and broader related topics. For example, she co-developed the Budapest-Vienna Seminar with a colleague from the University of Vienna, addressing the imperial metropoles of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires during the long nineteenth century. In recent years, she has taught courses on comparative approaches to religion and secularism, the relevance of religious and cultural transfers in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the mandatory Religious Studies Program course Bookish Tradition and Authority in Scripturalist Religions. In courses such as Popular Movements and the Crowd: Religion, Culture, and Society—developed before 2010, but which gained unexpected relevance—she connects Arab and Ottoman history with European history, demonstrating that popular movements are central to the study of any society and that the phenomenon of the crowd engages both socio-political and ritual domains, sacred and profane, across regions.