Faculty Profile
- Hanssen, Jens, D.Phil. Oxford
- Associate Professor, UTM
- jens.hanssen@utoronto.ca
- (905) 569-4592
(416) 978-3143 - Office: UTM NE295B & BF 317
Field: Modern Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history.
Professor Hanssen specializes in modern Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history. He has published Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital with OUP (2005), co-authored History, Space and Social Conflict in Beirut in 2005, and co-edited Empire in the City; Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire in 2002. He has written and presented his academic work in English, Arabic, French and German on Ottoman imperialism, municipal and intellectual history of the Middle East, memory and reconstruction in postwar Lebanon, and filmed a short documentary on academic life in Iraq after the U.S. invasion during his visit to Baghdad in June 2003. He is interested in the connection between intellectual trends and urban culture in the modern Middle East, in particular the 19th-century Arab renaissance; the transition from Ottoman to colonial Baghdad; the rationalities of late Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces; imperialism, liberalism and cosmopolitanism in the modern Mediterranean; post-national histories of modernity in the Middle East.