Leila Fawaz
Leila Fawaz is a Lebanese historian and academician. She is the founding director of The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies from 2001 to 2012. Fawaz was born in Sudan to Greek-Orthodox Lebanese parents and raised in Lebanon. She took two degrees at the American University of Beirut between 1967 and 1968 and pursued graduate studies in history at Harvard University between 1972 and 1979.
She became a member of the Tufts University faculty in 1979, and became a full professor in 1994. She chaired the History Department from 1994 to 1996. From 1996 to 2001, she served as dean of arts and humanities and as associate dean of the faculty. At Tufts, Fawaz became the Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies, where she also held appointments as professor of diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and as professor of history.
From 1990 to 1994, she Fawaz was the editor-in-chief of The International Journal of Middle East Studies, there she advanced the notion of conducting analytical and comparative research, with an international and cross-disciplinary approach. She bemoaned the overspecialization within the field, the neglect of attention to humanities/arts and, uninteresting writing, and linked these problems to Middle East studies as a whole, because researchers were "still a long way from being pathfinders in the world of scholarship generally."
Fawaz also served on the editorial board of The American Historical Review. A former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Comité Scientifique of the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme at the Université de Provence. Fawaz served on the board of overseers of Harvard University from 1996 to 2012.
In 2012 she was named a "chevalier" in the French National Order of the Legion of Honor. She was honored for her "exemplary personal commitment to French-American relations" and for her efforts to promote French academic research and thought at prestigious American universities."
