Toufoul Abou-Hodeib is a historian of the modern Middle East. She is the author of A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford University Press, 2017). She earned her Ph.D. in History of Culture at the University of Chicago (2010), taught modern Middle East history at the University of Oxford, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oslo and the EUME program of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Currently she is working on a project that explores folklore in the twentieth-century Levant in relation to the global circulation of knowledge, politics, and aesthetics.
Background
Postdoctoral fellow (2012-2015), Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo
Visiting Lecturer (2011-2012), Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford
Postdoctoral Fellow (2010-2011), "Europe in the Middle East - the Middle East in Europe," Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
Ph.D. History of Culture (2010), University of Chicago
M.A. in Social Sciences (2002), University of Amsterdam
Bach. of Arch. (1998), American University of Beirut
Teaching Experience
University of Oxford: "The History of the Middle East, 1860-1971," (M.Phil.); "The Middle East in the Age of Empire, 1882-1971," (undergraduate); "Nationalism and Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914-1961," (undergraduate); Supervision of undergraduate and M.Phil. theses.
University of Chicago: "Culture of Modernity in the Middle East," (undergraduate & graduate).
American University of Beirut: Introductory Arabic, Intensive Summer Program, Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies.
Positions of Trust
Board member, Scholars at Risk, University of Oslo, 2024–.
Board member, Norwegian Aid Committee, 2024–.
Board member, NTL, University of Oslo, 2025–.
Reading proficiency in Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Ottoman Turkish.