Khaled Fahmy

Khaled Fahmy is the Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East in the Department of History at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences. Previously, he held distinguished academic positions including Sultan Qaboos Professor of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Cambridge (2017-2022), Shawwaf Visiting Professor at Harvard University (2015-2017), Arcapita Visiting Professor at Columbia University (2015), Professor and Chair at the American University in Cairo (2010-2014), Associate Professor at New York University (1999-2010), and Assistant Professor at Princeton University (1994-1999).

Education:

• Doctor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, 1993
• Master of Arts, American University in Cairo, 1988
• Bachelor of Arts, American University in Cairo, 1985

Khaled Fahmy is a historian of the modern Middle East with special emphasis on nineteenth century Egypt. His research examines the history of the Egyptian army in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the history of medicine, law and urban planning in 19th- and 20th-century Egypt. Through topics such as conscription, vaccination, quarantines, forensic medicine and legal torture, he charts the specific ways in which a modern state was established in Egypt and analyzes how Egyptians accommodated, subverted or resisted these state institutions. His current work focuses on a military, social and cultural history of the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, which he has presented in a 12-part video series on social media.

Analysis of Fahmy's publications reveals a consistent scholarly trajectory centered on 19th-century Egyptian history, particularly examining state formation through medical, legal, and military institutions. His work bridges social, legal, and medical history to understand state-society dynamics. While early publications focused on military history and state building under Mehmed Ali, his research later expanded to legal history and forensic medicine, then to broader social history topics including women's history and public health. Recent work has expanded chronologically to include 20th-century topics like the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict and contemporary issues such as the crisis of humanities in Egypt.

Fahmy actively engages with public scholarship through regular and social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Clubhouse) and maintains a bilingual blog (www.khaledfahmy.org). He teaches courses including Middle East to WWI, Middle East & North Africa Since WWI, Egypt Since 1952, and graduate-level thesis supervision. His teaching spans undergraduate senior theses, master's theses, and doctoral dissertations in Middle Eastern and Central Asian history.