David Motadel

Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

David Motadel is Associate Professor of International History at the LSE. A graduate of Cambridge,
where he was a Gates Scholar, he has held visiting positions at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Sciences Po,
and the Sorbonne. He is the author of a book on the history of Muslims under German rule in the
Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2014), which was awarded the Ernst Fraenkel Prize,
and the editor of a volume on Islam and the European Empires (Oxford University Press, 2014).
His articles have been published in numerous academic journals, including Past & Present, The
American Historical Review, and The Historical Journal.

He also regularly writes on history and current affairs for newspapers and magazines. His reviews and
essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The
London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. He is a Fellow of the
Royal Historical Society. In 2018, he received the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.

During his year at SCAS, he will complete a book entitled The Shah’s Grand Tour: Global Monarchy
in the Age of Empire. It will examine the European tours of the Qajar monarchs Nasir al-Din Shah
(1873, 1878, and 1889) and Muzaffar al-Din Shah (1900, 1902, and 1905) in the era of high imperialism.
A global microhistory, the study will offer a reinterpretation of the relationship between European and
non-European rulers in an age of European domination. It draws on sources from British, French,
German, Austrian, Belgian, Dutch, Swiss, Italian, Russian, Turkish, and Iranian archives, including
the Persian travelogues (safarnamas) of the shahs.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2022-23.