Office: FAB 3.38 (Faculty of Arts Building, third floor)

Email: henry.clements@warwick.ac.uk

Office hours: Mondays 10:00-11:00 and Wednesdays 11:00-12:00 (sign up here)

My research and teaching center on the intellectual and religious history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. I am interested in the concepts and frameworks that came to structure Ottoman and post-Ottoman society in the modern period including religion, race, politics, history, mind, reason, and nature, in addition to the translational problematics that the historical study of such concepts entails.

In my current book project, The Ottoman Secular: History and Difference among the Suryani, 1839-1935, I draw on a unique set of communal sources to explore how one minority community negotiated the secularizing transformations of the late Ottoman Empire. This work has led me to related theoretical projects on history, modernity, and the West, as well as historical investigations into modern Arabic and Turkish treatments of the histories of Islam and Christianity.

Academic Profile

• 2024- : Assistant Professor of History, University of Warwick
• 2023-2024: Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Oxford
• MA, MPhil, PhD, Yale University
• BA, Washington University in St. Louis

Teaching

• HI280 The Ottoman Empire (BA)
• HI993 Themes & Approaches in the Historical Study of Religious Cultures (MA)
• HI998 Themes in Modern History (MA)

Publications

Articles

2022. "Modern Translations: Reflections on Postcolonialism, New Ontology, and the Secular." History of the Present 12 (2): 241-269. Co-authored with Philip Balboni.

2019. "Documenting Community in the Late Ottoman Empire." International Journal of Middle East Studies 51 (3): 423-443.

Book reviews

2022. Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019). Toynbee Prize Foundation Roundtable Panel.

Essays

2024. "Arabic ≠ Latin: Sacred Language in a Secular Age." Public Books.