Middle East Strategy at Harvard

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of more than two dozen books, including The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, and the post-9/11 international best-sellers What Went Wrong? and Crisis in Islam.

Born and raised in London, he graduated in 1936 from the then School of Oriental Studies (SOAS, now School of Oriental and African Studies) at the University of London with a B.A. in history with special reference to the Near and Middle East, and obtained his Ph.D. three years later, also from SOAS, specializing in the history of Islam. During the Second World War, Lewis served in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps in 1940-41, and was then attached to a department of the Foreign Office. After the war he returned to SOAS, and in 1949 he was appointed to the new chair in Near and Middle Eastern history at the age of 33. In 1974 Lewis accepted a joint position at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, where he served until 1986.

Professor Lewis was the first Western scholar permitted access to the archives of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. His work is distinguished by its attention to the lives of ordinary people, as well as kings and rulers. He was among the first to study issues of race, slavery, class and the status of women in Middle Eastern history. In addition to his historical studies, he has published translations of classical Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Hebrew poetry.

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