Name Henry Laurens Role Historian | Books L'ORIENT ARABE | |
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Education Institut francais du Proche-Orient (1981–1982), Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales | ||
Henry Laurens (born 1954) is a French historian, and author of several reference works about the Arab-Muslim world. He is Professor and Chair of History of the Contemporary Arab World at the Collège de France, Paris.
Laurens specializes in several related areas of research: European-Ottoman contacts in the 19th century, Franco-Arab relations, Middle-Eastern politics, European thought in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the history of modern Palestine, about which he has written a four-volume work covering the period from 1799 to 1982 and teaches the period to present days at the Collège de France.
Since 1999, he has served on the Administrative Council of the French Institute of Oriental Archeology in Cairo. In 2004, he became a member of the High Council of the Institute of the Arab World (IMA) in Paris. He is also on the editorial board of the journal Maghreb-Machrek.
Education and early career
Laurens earned his degree and doctorate, specializing in Arabic literature, at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. From 1981 to 1983, he studied and taught abroad in Damascus and Cairo. He was awarded his doctorate, with high distinction, in 1989 at the Sorbonne–Paris IV, with a thesis on "The French Revolution and Islam,:History and Meanings of the Egyptian Expedition, 1798-1801."