Professor John-Paul Ghobrial

• Core subject area: European and Middle Eastern history in the early modern period.
• Teaching: I teach the undergraduate papers in early modern European and world history including the first-year paper on ‘Conquest and Colonisation’ and the second-year paper on ‘Eurasian Empires, 1400−1800’. I also occasionally teach the modern Further Subject on ‘The Middle East in the Age of Empire’. At graduate level, I contribute to the teaching of Theory & Methods and several other modules for the MPhil in British and European History. I supervise research students with interests in early modern Ottoman and European history.
• Research interests: I have a long-standing interest in the history of communication, and this was the subject of my first book, The Whispers of Cities (Oxford, 2013). My other major interest at the moment is in the history of Eastern Christianity, by which I mean primarily the history of the Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. I have published several articles on various aspects of this research and am now completing a monograph on the subject called Leaving Babylon. In 2015, I was awarded an ERC Starting Grant to direct a five-year project at Oxford called ‘Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World’ (2015−2020). 

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

As Praefectus, I am the resident Head and Academic Director of the Graduate Centre. As a Fellow of the College with oversight of the graduate community, I work closely with a range of colleagues to ensure that every student has what they need to thrive during their time at Balliol..