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Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Modern Middle Eastern Studies and Mediterranean History. During his Sabbatical in the academic year 2017/18, he holds a Vertretungsprofessur at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Göttingen, and is an associated EUME Fellow. He received his PhD in Modern History from Oxford University in 2001 and joined the University of Toronto the following year. He held junior research fellowships at the American University of Beirut and the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in Beirut, University of Aix-en-Provence/Marseille, and a postdoc fellowship by the Thyssen Foundation. He currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant (2014-2018) on “German-Jewish Echoes in 20th-century Arab Thought.”
Jens Hanssen’s overall research progamme explores the intellectual entanglements between Europe, North Africa and the Middle East since the late 19th century. He is interested in the connection between intellectual trends and urban culture, the rationalities of late Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces; diffraction, atheology, translation and travelling theory. His writings have appeared in The New Cambridge History of Islam, Critical Inquiry, Arab Studies Journal, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and www.hannaharendt.net - Zeitschrift für Politisches Denken.
His past book publications include Fin de Siècle Beirut (OUP, 2005); with Max Weiss, Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (CUP, 2016). The second CUP volume, Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age, also co-edited with Max Weiss (Princeton), and a translation of Nafir Suriyya with Hicham Safieddine (King’s College) for the University of California Press are forthcoming. He is currently co-editing the OUP Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History with Amal Ghazal (Simon Fraser U).