Lucia Carminati

I am a social and cultural historian of the modern Middle East, with a particular focus on nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Egypt. My research and teaching explore transnational processes and questions of state governance in provincial settings, empire, and the mobility of people, ideas, and goods.

I am currently working on a manuscript titled "Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 1859-1906: Labor Mobility and the Making of the Suez Canal." In this book, embracing labor migrants who followed domestic as well as international routes, I trace the social and cultural history of the Suez Canal region. I pay particular attention to the different kinds of mobility and circulation that both traversed and wound up in Port Said and the Isthmus of Suez. My future research will take two directions. One is the social history of public health and medicine in the Suez Isthmus region in the turn of the twentieth century. The other is an exploration of migrants' correspondence, with particular emphasis on the history of motherhood and childhood in the Egyptian context. I have so far received research support from the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation with the Council for Library and Information Resources, the Zeit Foundation, the Coordinating Council for Women Historians with the Berkshire Conference, and the University of Arizona. My work has so far appeared in venues such as Comparative Studies in History and Society, Journal of Urban History, and Rethinking History.

At Texas Tech, I look forward to teaching introductory classes on the Modern Middle East, 1800 to the Present (HIST 3398); Global Islam. Past and Present (HIST 4385); World History Since 1500 (HIST 2323); and a graduate seminar, Studies in Middle Eastern History (HIST 5372).

My interest in the Middle East was first sparked by the study of Classical Arabic and an eye-opening travel to Syria in 2005. I received a BA in Middle East Studies and an MA in International Relations at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. In 2018, I completed a PhD in Modern Middle East History at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Before joining Texas Tech, I was a Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and a Visiting Researcher at the Department of International, Legal, Historical, and Political Studies of the Università degli Studi di Milano.