Jonathan Wyrtzen’s teaching and research engages a set of related thematic areas that include empire and colonialism, state formation and non-state forms of political organization, ethnicity and nationalism, and religion and socio-political action. His work focuses on society and politics in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly with regards to interactions catalyzed by the expansion of European empires into this region.
His next book project–tentatively titled Reimagining the Middle East: Jihads, Empires, and the Long Great War–demonstrates how multiple scales and forms of state-based and non-state based political order were imagined by various European and local actors between 1911-1931, why these came into conflict, and how these interactions influenced the definition of a proto-interstate topography from Morocco to Iraq. Against the dominant narrative of Europeans imposing artificial borders in the region after the war, this study exposes a much more complicated and violent story in which both local and European powers played major roles in forging a new political order in the Middle East and North Africa.