Joshua Donovan is an interdisciplinary historian of the modern Middle East whose work situates the region and its people in a wider global perspective. His research explores the intersections of identity, migration, social movements, and human rights, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
His current book project, Imagining Antioch: Sectarianism, Nationalism, and Migration in the Greek Orthodox Levant, tells a new history of the Orthodox Christian community in Syria, Lebanon, and its diaspora from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Reformulating sect as an imagined social and political community, the book traces group identity formation through Ottoman state reform, the French partition of the Levant, and the early postcolonial period with a particular focus on the impact of empire and migration on the Orthodox community. He is also co-editing a special journal issue on knowledge production and forced migration in the modern world.
Prior to coming to Boston College, Donovan was a postdoctoral fellow in the history of migration at the German Historical Institute’s Pacific Office at the University of California, Berkeley. Before that, he taught Contemporary Civilization as a Core Preceptor at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. in History in 2022. His research has been supported by the Max Weber Stiftung, the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies, and Columbia’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.
