Professor John-Paul Ghobrial

• Core subject area: Early modern European and World History
• Teaching: I teach the undergraduate papers in early modern European and world history including the core papers in early modern European history (Prelims and FHS), the Optional Subject on ‘Violence, Community and Identity in Late Ottoman Syria’, and the second-year paper on ‘Eurasian Empires, 1450−1800’. At graduate level, I teach ‘Theory and Methods’ and ‘Microhistory and its Uses’ for the MSt in History. I supervise MSt and DPhil students with interests in early modern Ottoman and global history, especially those working on sources and archives related to my own research.
• Research interests: I have a long-standing interest in the history of information, and this was the subject of my first book, The Whispers of Cities (Oxford, 2013), as well as articles in several journals including Past and Present. My other major area of research is the history of the Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th to the 20th century. The culmination of this research is a book I am now completing on the subject called Leaving Babylon: A Story of Belief and Belonging in the Early Modern World. Since 2015, I have been the Principal Investigator for two major projects funded by the European Research Council: Stories of Survival (2015−2020) and Moving Stories (2021−2026).  

For further details of my research and publications, please see my departmental web page.