Associate Professor
Email: sscalenghe@loyola.edu
Phone: 410-617-2017
Office: Humanities Center 301
ON LEAVE 2023-2024
Biography
Sara Scalenghe is a historian of the social and cultural history of the early modern and modern Middle East, with a focus on the Arab world. She graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, with a B.A. in Arabic and Persian, and then went on to pursue an M.A. in Arab Studies and a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and North African History from Georgetown University. Before returning to the East Coast and joining the Department of History at Loyola University Maryland in 2009, she held a Qatar Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, followed by two years as an Assistant Professor of History and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. At Loyola, she is a core faculty member in the Global Studies program. Prof. Scalenghe's research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays program, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the American Historical Association. Her first book, Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Paperback, 2016), won the 2016 Disability History Association Outstanding Book Award. In June and July 2018 Prof. Scalenghe had the privilege to direct a four-week Summer Institute for College and University Teachers funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled "Global Histories of Disability." In 2019 she edited a roundtable on Disability Studies in the Middle East and North Africa for the International Journal of Middle East Studies. She is currently writing a book on disability in the Arab world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is also co-editing, with Beverly Tsacoyianis, a volume on disability history in the MENA region, and she is co-authoring, with Judith Tucker and Nadya Sbaiti, a history of women and gender in the Middle East (under contract with Cambridge University Press). From 2017 to 2020 she served as the President of the Disability History Association.
Courses Taught
- HS 107 The Making of the Modern World: The Middle East
- HS 397 Women and Gender in the Middle East
- HS 398 Global Histories of Disability
- HS 449 The Modern Middle East Through Literature and Film
- HS 489 Seminar: America in the Middle East
- HS 491 Migration, Displacement, and Refugees in the Middle East
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HS 498 Seminar: Histories of Intellectual Disability
Publications
Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800
(Cambridge University Press, 2014. Paperback 2016.
Areas of Specialization
- Middle East and North Africa
- Disability
- Gender
News
- American Historical Association Member Spotlight: Sara Scalenghe.
- The National Endowment for the Humanities awards Dr. Scalenghe a $210,912 grant to direct a Summer Institute for College and University Teachers entitled "Global Histories of Disability."