Biography
Nadia El Cheikh is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and Professor of History at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Dr. El Cheikh is a scholar of the Abbasid Caliphate and Byzantium, with women and gender as a focal point of her research. She earned her BA in History and Archaeology with distinction from AUB in 1985 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1992. That same year she joined the AUB Faculty and was promoted to the rank of Professor in 2006. She has served as Director of the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies and was named Chair of the Department of History and Archaeology in 2013. She received the New York University, Global Affair's International Visitors Program Grant in 2004 and in 2007 and was the Shawwaf Visiting Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She has published three history books and co-edited three edited volumes. Her book, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, was published by the Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs in 2004 and translated into Turkish and Greek. In 2013 She co-authored a book entitled Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court. Formal and Informal Politics in the Caliphate of al-Muqtadir (295-320/908-932) (Leiden: Brill). Her most recent book, Women, Islam and Abbasid Identity was published in 2015 by Harvard University Press. In 2016, she served as interim associate provost until she was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Publications with AUB Press: