Eve Troutt Powell

Troutt Powell is a historian of the modern Middle East and its relationship with Africa. Her teaching and scholarship focus on slavery, colonialism, and the development of ethnic, racial, and national identities. Her research into Egypt as both a colonized territory of Great Britain and a colonizer of the Sudan—the “colonized colonizer,” as she terms it—is regarded as a groundbreaking, broadly influential study of the interplay between colonialism, slavery, and nationalism. Drawing from a variety of sources including film, cartoons and photography, Troutt Powell is advancing understandings of slavery linked to Africa, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire while at the same time forging new methods of historiography.

Troutt Powell was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2003. She has been a fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt, the Social Science Resource Council, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She has served as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in Penn Arts & Sciences and as graduate chair in history, and she is a member of the Middle East Center and the Center for Africana Studies. She earned her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.