Christopher Cooper-Davies

Christopher Cooper-Davies is a historian of the politics, culture and society of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on the Shi'i communities of the Ottoman Empire and its successor state's in the twentieth century. He is interested in Iraqi and Lebanese political and intellectual thought; urban associational life, civil society and the public sphere in Middle East; and the global dimensions of Shi'i political and religious culture since the nineteenth century.

Before joining SOAS, Christopher was a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, having completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2022. He holds a BA in History from Queen Mary, University of London, and an MA in Middle Eastern history from SOAS.

Christopher's current British Academy project is called "The Making of Global Shi`ism: Scholars, Migrants and Migrating Ideologies, c. 1900–1979." The project posits an innovative micro-historical methodology for the study of transnational religious phenomena by reconstructing the movements, activities and networks of mobile Arab Shi’i intellectuals and economic migrants across the Middle East, North America, South Asia and beyond.

Alongside his current project, Christopher is working on his first monograph, provisionally titled Shi'i City: the Najafi Cultural Revival and the Emergence of Modern Iraq. His research has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including the Journal of Global History, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and Arab Studies Journal.

• Modern Middle East
• Iraq
• Shi'ism
• Arab political thought
• Sectarianism
• Global history
• Histories of Arab civil society and the public sphere