Allen Fromherz
Senior Humanities Research Fellow
Education: BA Summa Cum Laude, Dartmouth College; PhD, St. Andrews University
About Allen
Dr. Allen Fromherz is Associate Professor of Mediterranean, Middle East, and Gulf History at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His first two books, The Almohads: the Rise of an Islamic Empire (IB Tauris) and Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times (Edinburgh) examine the rise of Empire in lineage-based societies in North Africa. Qatar, A Modern History (Georgetown, 2013) focuses on the importance of memory and history in Qatari and Gulf society from the 19th century to the present.
Spanning both North Africa and the Middle East, Dr. Fromherz's most recent work focuses on the history of maritime, composite cultures from the Mediterranean to the Gulf. He completed The Near West: North Africa and the Medieval Western Mediterranean (Edinburgh, expected 2016) and is currently writing The Global Gulf: A History under contract with Harvard University Press. The Global Gulf focuses on the long term history of cosmopolitan culture in the Gulf. It also examines the role and meaning of heritage and memory in the Gulf today.
In addition to previously holding fellowships from Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, Dr. Fromherz was a Senior Fellow at the NYU Abu Dhabi Humanities Institute in academic year 2016-17.
Publications
Selected Publications
Fromherz, Allen. The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present. University of California Press, 2024.
Fromherz, Allen. The Global Gulf: A History. Harvard University Press (forthcoming).
Fromherz, Allen, ed. The Gulf in World History: Arabia at the Global Crossroads. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Fromherz, Allen. Qatar: A modern history (2nd edition). Georgetown University Press, 2017.
Fromherz, Allen. The Near West: Medieval North Africa, Latin Europe and the Mediterranean in the Second Axial Age. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Fromherz, Allen. From Muscat to Zanzibar: Sayyid Said bin Sultan’s Cosmopolitan Empire. Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, 2016.
Fromherz, Allen. “ISIS vs. History.” The American Interest 11, no. 4 (2015).
