Professor John-Paul A. Ghobrial

01865 (2)77796john-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.