Anthony Gorman

Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History

Biography

Background

Born and raised in Dharawal country in the south of Sydney, and from an old Australian family that had settled in Burragorang Valley in the 1820s courtesy of a Ticket-of-Leave, Anthony Gorman graduated with a BA (Hons) in Ancient History from the University of Sydney in 1982, during which he took some languages both ancient and modern (Greek, Latin and German), a little Archaeology and less Anthropology. In need of a break after five years of intense study he bought a one-way ticket to Indonesia and continued to travel west, by land wherever possible. He ended up spending two years in Asia and the Middle East, two in Europe and two in the Americas before arriving back in Sydney six years later.

By now ready for a return to study but with a more contemporary focus he enrolled as a PhD student at Macquarie University working on the politics of modern Egyptian historiography under the supervision of Robert Springborg. This included a seminal experience as an exchange student at the American University in Cairo where he conducted fieldwork and worked hard on his Arabic. He graduated in 1998 and took up a Greek Postdoctoral Fellowship (ΙΚΥ) in Athens, where he updated his Classical Greek and gained a Modern Greek language qualification, while pursuing research on the Greeks of modern Egypt, a subject on which he continues to work, and enjoying many aspects of urban Greek life: food, drink, music.

He returned to Egypt to teach in the Department of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, followed by a number of years at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Initially as Lecturer in the Department of History, he was later appointed AHRB Research Fellow from 2003 to 2005, working on the ‘Cultures of Confinement’ project, an examination of the history of the prison in Asia, Africa and Latin America led by Frank Dikötter.

His fortunes took him further north to the University of Edinburgh. Since his initial appointment in 2006 Dr Gorman has taught in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Edinburgh, delivering the sub-Honours survey course of the Modern Middle East for many years that few students have been able to avoid. At honours and postgraduate level he has taught on Middle Eastern Diasporas, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Middle Eastern culture and political aspects of Middle Eastern scholarship.

Undergraduate teaching

  • Modern Middle Eastern History A: Domestic Transformation and International Challenges
  • Modern Middle Eastern History B: Postwar Independence and Conflict
  • The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Nations in Collision

Postgraduate teaching

  • Critical Readings in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (team taught)
  • The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Nations in Collision

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Modern Egyptian history and historiography

Social and cultural Egyptian history of 19th and 20th centuries

Middle Eastern diasporas

The Anarchist Movement in the Middle East

The Press in the Middle East before 1950

Crime, Punishment and the Prison in the Middle East

The Greeks of Egypt

Current PhD students supervised

The Egyptian Military and the National Community

 

 

 

 

Past PhD students supervised

Principal Supervisor

The Resettlement of the Syrian Ismaʿilis in Salamiyya in the mid-Nineteenth Century Ottoman Syria (awarded 2023)

Social Mobilisations and the Public Sphere in Post-occupation Iraq (Co-super) (awarded 2020)

Intellectual networks, language and knowledge under colonialism: the work of Stephan Stephan, Elias Haddad and Tawfiq Canaan in Palestine, 1909-1948  (Awarded 2018)     

Linguistic Practice on Contemporary Jordanian Radio: Publics and Participation (Awarded 2018)

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Decline (1982-2007). Political Agency and Marginalisation (awarded 2017)

The Ideological Transformation of Egypt’s Largest Militant Groups (awarded 2017)

Hamas-Egypt Relations: Tactical Cooperation in the Margins of Strategic Differences due to Regime Survival Concerns (awarded 2016)

The Making of a Resistance Identity: Communism and the Lebanese Shi'a 1943-1990 (awarded 2016)

Negotiating the Field: American Protestant Missionaries in Ottoman Syria, 1823 to 1860s (awarded 2009)

 

Second Supervisor

The transformation of the Syrian business community through the 2011 revolution (awarded 2018)

Turkey's 'New' Foreign Policy in the Middle East: The Civil Society Factor (awarded 2018)

Ambivalence and the National Imaginary: Nation and Canon Formation in the Emergence of the Saudi Novel (awarded 2016)

 Income Generation Through Zakat: The Islamization Impact on Malaysian Religious Institution (awarded 2014)

Examining Editions of The Natural History of Aleppo: Revitalizing Eighteenth-Century Texts (awarded 2013)

Research summary

  • The history of the prison in the modern Middle East
  • Ethnic communities in the modern Middle East
  • Greeks of the Middle East
  • Anarchism and radical secular politics in the modern Middle East
  • The Middle Eastern press
  • Historians and Historiography of the modern Middle East
  • The Egyptian labour movement

Project activity

  • Prison, Punishment and Society in the Middle East, 1800-1950, to be published by the Edinburgh University Press.
  • A study of the anarchist movement in the Eastern Mediterranean before 1914
  • The History of Arabic scholarship at the University of Edinburgh
  • Middle Eastern Studies in Scotland: Students and Scholars

Past project grants

CASAW Network grant (£10,000)

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