Nabil Matar has been Presidential Professor in the President’s Interdisciplinary Initiative on Arts and Humanities at the University of Minnesotta since 2007.
On April 26, 2018 Matar will deliver the 16th Farhat J. Ziadeh Distinguished Lecture in Arab and Islamic Studies
"The United States through Arab Eyes: 1876-1914".
Nabil Matar studied English Literature at the American University of Beirut where he received his B.A. and M.A. In 1976, he completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge University on the poetry of Thomas Traherne. He taught at Jordan University and the American University of Beirut, and received postdoctoral grants from the British Council (Clare Hall, Cambridge University) and from Fulbright (Harvard Divinity School).
In 1986, Dr. Matar moved to the United States and started teaching in the Humanities Department at Florida Institute of Technology. In 1997, he became the Department Head and served until 2007 when he moved to the English Department at the University of Minnesota. He is Presidential Professor in the President’s Interdisciplinary Initiative on Arts and Humanities and teaches in the departments of English and History, and in the Religious Studies Program.
Dr. Matar’s research in the past two decades has focused on relations between early modern Britain, Western Europe, and the Islamic Mediterranean. He is author of numerous articles, chapters in books and encyclopedia entries, and the trilogy: Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (Cambridge UP, 1998), Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia UP, 1999), and Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (UP of Florida, 2005). He wrote the introduction to Piracy, Slavery and Redemption (Columbia UP, 2001) and has completed a second trilogy on Arabs and Europeans in the early modern world: In the Lands of the Christians (Routledge, 2003); Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727 (Columbia UP, 2009); and An Arab Ambassador in the Mediterranean World (1779-1787)(Routledge, 2015). With Professor Gerald MacLean, he published Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 (Oxford UP, 2011), and with Professor Judy Hayden, he edited a collection of essays on travel to the Holy Land in the early modern period: Through the Eyes of the Beholder: the Holy Land in Early Modern Imagination, Brill, 2012). He also edited, introduced, and annotated Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: ‘The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism,’ (Columbia University Press, 2013), and completed British Captives in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (Brill, Leiden, 2014). His forthcoming publication is Arab Impressions of America: Writings from Early Emigrants (1876-1914), An Anthology (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). He was Principal Investigator of, “Shared Cultural Spaces: Islam and the West in the Arts and Sciences,” National Endowment of the Humanities Conference (24-26 February 2011) and in recognition of his "pioneering scholarship on the relationship between Islamic civilisation and early modern Europe," Dr. Matar was given the Building Bridges award at the University of Cambridge (28 March 2012). As of July 2017, he will hold the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities at the University of Minnesota.