Ghassan Osmat

I am a historian and literary scholar of the Eastern Mediterranean, currently holding a Visiting Fellowship & SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University’s Council on Middle East Studies. I obtained my PhD in Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations from the University of Toronto in July 2025. My research examines Christian Arabic society as a crossroads for Eurasian and Mediterranean religious, cultural, and literary currents in the early modern period. During this fellowship, I intend to revise my doctoral dissertation into a book, tentatively entitled “The Levantine Renaissance: Christian Arabic Culture and the Making of the Early Modern Mediterranean.” This book will show the emergence of a monastic movement that became the precursor of the Arab Christians’ consequential role in the Nahda, Arab cultural modernity, and the formation of the world literary tradition of the 1001 Nights.

I am also currently pursuing a second project, entitled “Levantine Travel Literature in the Age of Discovery," that studies little-known travel poems and prose written by ordinary people about their immigration and exile during the 15^th to 18^th centuries.

I have articles both published and forthcoming at the Mamluk Studies Review, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and other journals.