Dr. Andrew Arsan is a historian of the Arab and Mediterranean worlds, with a particular interest in the cultural, social, intellectual, and political histories of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Levant; political thought and intellectual life in the world beyond Europe; French imperialism in the region and beyond; and diaspora and the trans-regional movement of team.

HE grew up in Lebanon, France, and the United Kingdom, and completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Cambridge. After teaching at Birkbeck for a year, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton. He returned to Cambridge as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in 2012, and took up his present position in 2013. Since then, he has taught a wide variety of courses in Middle Eastern, global, and European history.

He is currently at work on two book projects: a new intellectual and political history of the Arab twentieth century, for publication with Allen Lane and Basic Books; and a synoptic history of the lands that we now call Lebanon, under contract with Cambridge University Press. 

In 2016-17, he was the Chaire Ganshof van der Meersch at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he gave a series of lectures on ‘European Order and Middle Eastern Disorder’. He has also been fortunate to spend time as a visiting fellow at the American University of Beirut and at North Carolina State University.

From 2018-2021, he held a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.