Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept

ROGER ADELSON is recently retired as Professor of History at Arizona State University, Tempe, where he taught beginning in 1974. After receiving his Ph.D. at Washington University, St. Louis, he was Alistair Home Senior Research Fellow at Oxford and taught at Harvard University. Dr. Adelson’s research has focused on British and U.S. policies toward the Middle East since the mid-nineteenth century. He edited The Historian from 1990 to 1996 and has published more than one hundred articles, essays, and reviews in history journals. He is the author oiMark Sykes: Portrait of an Amateur (1975), London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power and War, 1902–1922 (1995), and Churchill and the British Impact in the Middle East (2009). He is presently writing Truman to Bush: The Impact of the Middle East on the U.S. Presidency.

ABBAS AM ANAT is Professor of History and the Director of the Iranian Studies Initiative at Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He received his B.A. from Tehran University in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1981. He is the author of numerous works, including Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarch, 1831–1896 (1997) and Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 18441850 (1989), and editor of other books. Amanat was a Carnegie Scholar of Islamic Studies in 2005–7 and the recipient of the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Grant for Comparative Study of Millennialism in 1998–2001. He is a consulting editor and longtime contributor to the Encyclopedia Iranica and in 1991–98 he was the editor-inchief of Iranian Studies. He is currently writing In Search of Modern Iran: Authority, Nationhood and Culture (1501–2001) as well as a biography of the Babi leader and poet Fatima Baraghani Qurrat al-’Ayn (Tahirah) and a documentary history of Qajar Iran (in Persian).

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