Roy Bar Sadeh is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Graduate School for Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin. A social and intellectual historian in a global framework, Roy examines how people across the Middle East, South Asia, and Eurasia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries experienced and contributed to regional and international debates about sovereignty, citizenship, and religious and social difference. From 2022 to 2023, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale University Law School. Roy received his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2022. 

 

Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History, 1856-1947

 

Roy is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the global history of the concept of minority from the multi-lingual perspectives of Muslim thinkers across the Ottoman, British, and Tsarist Empires and their successor states. This manuscript is based on two years of archival research in private and state repositories, mainly in India, Russia, Israel/Palestine, and Britain. It draws on a variety of sources (such as treatises, private letters, pamphlets, official documents, autobiographies, and travelogues) in Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Russian, and French. Roy’s doctoral dissertation received the 2022 Ab Imperio Award. His research has been funded by the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the New York Universities Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History, the Harriman Institute, and other institutions. He has published in different peer-reviewed journals, including the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Roy’s forthcoming articles will appear in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the International Journal of Islam in Asia. Roy has worked as a teaching fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University, including for undergraduate survey classes in modern South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Russian history. In Fall 2023 Roy will teach at Freie Universität a seminar on the global history of minority rights. Roy’s broader research interests include comparative empires and nationalisms, minority rights, Islamic thought, global histories of social and religious difference, the relationship between concepts and everyday practices, anti-colonial thought, and interdisciplinary approaches to intellectual history.

contact: roy.bar.sadeh@fu-berlin.de