Philip S. Khoury

Professor Khoury was born and raised in Washington, D.C. and educated at the Sidwell Friends School, the American University of Beirut, Trinity College and Harvard University (PhD 1980). He joined the MIT History Faculty in 1981 and served as Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) between 1991 and 2006. He was appointed as the inaugural Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS in 2002 and Vice Provost in 2006.

Professor Khoury, as Vice Provost, is responsible for overseeing MIT’s non-curricular arts programs and initiatives, including the MIT Museum and the List Visual Arts Center. He is also directly engaged in MIT’s strategic planning for international education and research; MIT’s efforts to promote the public understanding of science and technology and existing activities and new opportunities at the intersections of MIT’s five schools: Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Management, and Science.

Professor Khoury is a political and social historian of the Middle East. Among his publications are Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism (Cambridge University Press); Syria and the French Mandate (Princeton University Press), which received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association; Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (University of California Press); The Modern Middle East: A Reader (Palgrave/MacMillan); and Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-war Reconstruction (Brill).

Professor Khoury serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. In 1985, he established the Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar at MIT, a public forum for the examination of contemporary Middle Eastern affairs. He is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American University of Beirut and is a Trustee of UL (Underwriters Laboratories). He is also an Overseer of Koç University in Istanbul. He has served as Vice Chairman of the Trinity College Board of Trustees and as a Trustee of the National Humanities Center and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He served as a member of the Academic Research Council in Singapore and as a Director of the Harvard Cooperative Society.

Professor Khoury is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  He served as President of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).  He has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and Thomas J. Watson Foundation. He has been a Visiting Associate of St. Antony’s College in the University of Oxford, and a Faculty Associate of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He holds honorary degrees from Earth University and Trinity College.