Bio
Peter Hill is an Associate Professor of History at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda (Cambridge, 2020) and a biography of Mikha'il Mishaqa, Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East(London, 2024). He has held grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the British Academy, and in 2023 was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.
Research project
The Unquiet Hills: The Global Nineteenth Century Seen from the Syrian Mountains
This project investigates the changing politics of Ottoman Syria in the context of the international ‘Eastern Question’ crisis of 1840. It seeks to integrate the detailed study of Mount Lebanon and other upland areas of Ottoman Syria with global history, examining how the emergence of new political leaders and projects in these zones was connected with the upheavals of the Age of Revolutions and the consolidation of a capitalist world order which followed it. As well as archival history, the project draws on methodologies from anthropology, sociology and political theory, to look at a crucial moment in the emergence of modernity from a particular location, the mountains of Lebanon and Syria.
