Michael Christopher Low | Director, Middle East Center, Middle East Studies Program
Assistant Professor
Michael Christopher Low
Director, Middle East Center,
Middle East Studies
Assistant Professor
801/581-3028
CTIHB 367
About
Michael Christopher Low is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. Low is the author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020). In 2021, Imperial Mecca received the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award and was shortlisted for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize. Imperial Mecca has also been translated into Arabic and Turkish. He is also the co-editor of The Subjects of Ottoman International Law (Indiana University Press, 2020). In 2020-2021, he was a Senior Humanities Fellow for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is currently working on a new book project tracing the entangled environmental histories of water, desalination technology, energy, and climate change in the Arabian Peninsula.
- PhD., Department of History, Columbia University, 2015.
Modern Middle East, Ottoman Empire, Arabian Peninsula, Islamic World, Indian Ocean, Environmental History
Books
Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj. Columbia University Press, 2020.
İmparatorluk Mekke’si: Osmanlı Hicaz’ı ve Hint Okyanusunda Hac. Turkish translation of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj by Yunus Babacan. Istanbul: Telemak Kitap, 2023.
إدارة الحج إلى مكة: موضوع تجاذب بين السلطنة العثمانية والاستعمار الأوروبي. Arabic translation of Imperial Mecca:Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj by Rabi‘ Hindi. Beirut: Arab Scientific Publishers, 2022.
The Subjects of Ottoman International Law. Co-edited with Lâle Can, Kent F. Schull, and Robert Zens. Indiana University Press, 2020.
Articles and Book Chapters
“Deadly Journeys: Public Health and Mobility Regulation in the Age of Steam,” in Qaisra Khan with Nahla Nassar, eds., Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage: Essays in Honour of Nasser David Khalili, vol. 2 (London and Chicago: Gingko Library and the University of Chicago Press, 2024), 217-237.
“Desert Dreams of Drinking the Sea, Consumed by the Cold War: Transnational Flows of Energy and Desalination from the Pacific to the Persian Gulf,” Environment and History 26, no. 2 (2020): 145-174.
“The Infidel Piloting the True Believer: Thomas Cook and the Business of the Colonial Hajj,” in Umar Ryad, ed., The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empires (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 47-80.
Co-authored with Lâle Can, “The ‘Subjects’ of Ottoman International Law,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 3, no. 2 (2016): 223-234.
“Unfurling the Flag of Extraterritoriality: Autonomy, Foreign Muslims, and the Capitulations in the Ottoman Hijaz,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 3, no. 2 (2016): 299-323.
“Ottoman Infrastructures of the Saudi Hydro-State: The Technopolitics of Pilgrimage and Potable Water in the Hijaz,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 4 (2015): 942-974.
“The Indian Ocean and Other Middle Easts,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 549-555.
“Mecca: Pilgrimage and the Making of the Islamic World, 400-1500,” in Aran MacKinnon and Elaine MacKinnon, eds., Places of Encounter: Time, Place and Connectivity in World History, vol. 1 (Boulder: Westview Press, 2012), 127-144.
“Global Public Health and the Ghosts of Pilgrimages Past,” Jadaliyya, 22 October 2012.
“Empire and the Hajj: Pilgrims, Plagues, and Pan-Islam under British Surveillance, 1865-1908,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, no. 2 (2008): 269-290.
HIST 1510: World History Since 1500
HIST 3398/MID E 3545: History of the Middle East, 1798-1914
HIST 3400/MID E 3540: Middle East Since 1914
HIST 3910: Environmental History of the Middle East
HIST 7670: Colloquium in Environmental History/EHUM 6850: Issues in Environmental
Humanities
HIST 7800: Historical Theory and Methods
Environmental Humanities Research Professorship, University of Utah, 2023-2025.
ESRR Environmental History Research Grant, Department of History, University of Utah, 2022-2023.
Albert Hourani Book Award, Middle East Studies Association, 2021.
Shortlisted and Commended for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize, 2021.
Senior Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World, New York University Abu Dhabi, 2020-2021.
Dean’s Emerging Faculty Leaders Award, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa State University, 2020.
Visiting Research Fellowship, University of Glasgow Library, William Lind Foundation, 2019.
Partner Scholar and Collaborator with the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University (Project Director, Gwyn Campbell), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Partnership Grant, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present: Interrogating Historical Data to Enhance Understanding of Environmental Crises in the Indian Ocean World,” 2018-2025.
CIEPO Article Prize, Comité International des Études Pré-ottomanes et Ottomanes, 2016.
Alice Hamilton Prize, American Society for Environmental History, 2016.
Senior Visiting Fellowship, Koç University, Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, 2016.