Professor John-Paul A. Ghobrial

Professor of Modern and Global History

Balliol College

01865 (2)77796

john-paul.ghobrial@history.ox.ac.uk

I studied at Tufts, Oxford and Princeton, and taught at Cambridge for a few years before taking up my current post at Oxford in 2012. I am an historian of the Middle East, but my research sometimes draws me into the study of other parts of the world. My earliest published work focused on the history of information and communication. This was the subject of my first book, The Whispers of Cities (Oxford, 2013), which explored the circulation of oral, scribal and printed information between Istanbul, London and Paris in the late seventeenth century. Since the publication of the book, I have continued to publish more widely on the history of information, communication and translation in the early modern world. A second area of major interest has been the history of the Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire, and their interactions with Western Christianity, especially early modern Catholicism. In addition to several articles and two edited volumes on this subject, I was from 2015 until 2020 the Principal Investigator for an ERC-funded project called Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World. This project provided the backdrop for a set of publications about mobility, microhistory, and the history of archives including a volume I edited, Global History and Microhistory (2019). Since 2020, I have been the Principal Investigator for the ERC-funded project, Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East, which combines the study of mobile sectarianisms with the use of the family archives and private archives of Middle Eastern migrants in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Research Interests

The culmination of my research on the global history of Eastern Christianity is the book I am now completing under the title Leaving Babylon: A Story of Belief and Belonging in the Early Modern World. Alongside this, I am finishing off a few other commitments and developing a sourcebook on ideas of belonging in the late Ottoman empire in collaboration with the amazing group of postdoctoral researchers with whom I work on the Moving Stories project. Further details of this sourcebook can be found on the project website.

See page on Balliol College website

The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (OUP Oxford, December 2013)

Shortlisted for the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize.

In recent years, global historians have painted an impressionistic picture of what they call the 'connected world' of the seventeenth century. Inspired perhaps by the globalised world in which they write, scholars have emphasised how the circulation of people, objects, and ideas linked the distant reaches of the early modern world. Yet for all the advocates of such a 'connected history', we are only beginning to make sense of what global connectedness meant in the lives of ordinary people.

Global History and Microhistory (2019)

Two areas and approaches to historical writing which captured imaginations during the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were microhistory and global history. Microhistory connected with cultural history became a popular historical methodology from the later 1970s, especially in France and Italy. It gained a wide public reception around the film 'The Return of Martin Guerre' and Natalie Zemon Davis' historical contribution to this.

(with Feras Krimsti), ‘Special Issue: The Past and its Possibilities in Nahda Scholarship’, Philological Encounters volume 6 (2021)

This introduction to the special issue “The Past and its Possibilities in Nahḍa Scholarship” reflects on the role of the past in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nahḍa discourse. It argues that historical reflection played a pivotal role in a number of scholarly disciplines besides the discipline of history, notably philosophy and logic, grammar and lexicography, linguistics, philology, and adab.

‘Connected Histories and Eastern Christianities’, in Andreea Badea et al., Pathways through Early Modern Christianities in the series Cultures of Christianity, volume 1 (Böhlau Verlag, 2023), 185-210

From Lebanese immigrants in Argentina to Iraqi refugees in Sweden, Eastern Christians can be found today scattered around the entire world. Too often, however, this global migration has been seen purely as a modern development, one arising from contemporary political dynamics in the Middle East. In fact, this phenomenon had its roots in confessional changes in the early modern period.

‘Networks and the Making of a Connected World in the Sixteenth Century’, in Ann Blair et al., Information: A Short History (2024), 112-35

A landmark history that traces the creation, management, and sharing of information through six centuries

Thanks to modern technological advances, we now enjoy seemingly unlimited access to information. Yet how did information become so central to our everyday lives, and how did its processing and storage make our data-driven era possible? This volume is the first to consider these questions in comprehensive detail, tracing the global emergence of information practices, technologies, and more, from the premodern era to the present.

I welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students interested in working in archives and sources relevant to the study of Eastern Christianity, Ottoman history, and global history.

Among the papers to which I have contributed teaching in the past are the following:

Prelims	FHS	Masters
Approaches	Disciplines of History	Theory & Methods
EWP3: Renaissance, Recovery and Reform	EWF6: Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700	Microhistory and its Uses
When Neighbours became Strangers	EWF7: Eurasian Empires	Selfhood in History, 1500-Present
Conquest & Colonisation	Further Subject: ‘The Middle East in the Age of Empire’	Dawn of the Global World

Professor John-Paul A. Ghobrial

Featured Publication

The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (OUP Oxford, December 2013)

Global History and Microhistory (2019)

(with Feras Krimsti), ‘Special Issue: The Past and its Possibilities in Nahda Scholarship’, Philological Encounters volume 6 (2021)

‘Connected Histories and Eastern Christianities’, in Andreea Badea et al., Pathways through Early Modern Christianities in the series Cultures of Christianity, volume 1 (Böhlau Verlag, 2023), 185-210

‘Networks and the Making of a Connected World in the Sixteenth Century’, in Ann Blair et al., Information: A Short History (2024), 112-35

Current DPhil Students

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