Alan Mikhail, the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University, is a widely recognized historian of the early modern Muslim world. Across six books, over thirty scholarly articles, and dozens of essays and reviews, he has helped to establish the field of Middle East environmental history, positioned the Ottoman Empire at the center of global early modern history, and written creatively about the place of the archive in the making of past and present. He is currently working on the intertwined histories of Islam and colonial America.
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk calls Mikhail “original,” Stephen Greenblatt describes him as a “gifted historian,” and Natalie Zemon Davis finds his scholarship “important” and “lively.” With books and articles translated into over a dozen languages, Mikhail’s work has been compared to that of historian Fernand Braudel and literary scholar Erich Auerbach.
His most recent book, My Egypt Archive, received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology
His previous book God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and was named a book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement, History Today, Publishers Weekly, and Glamour.
Before that, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History received the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Book Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History won the Roger Owen Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association. Both it and The Animal in Ottoman Egypt won Yale’s Gustav Ranis International Book Prize. Mikhail’s articles in the American Historical Review, Environmental History, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies received prizes as well.
He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, and Time, and one of his books was featured on Jeopardy!