Eve M. Troutt Powell

Eve M. Troutt Powell

Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History

Middle Eastern history

215 898.3518

St. Leonard's Court, Room 400.4

Eve M. Troutt Powell teaches the history of the modern Middle East and the history of slavery in the Nile Valley and the Ottoman Empire. As a cultural historian, she emphasizes the exploration of literature and film in her courses. She is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003) and the co-editor, with John Hunwick, of The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton Series on the Middle East, Markus Wiener Press, 2002). Her most recent book is Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement in Egypt, Sudan and the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2012). 

Troutt Powell received her B.A, M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Prior to coming to Penn, she taught for ten years at The University of Georgia. She has received fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt and the Social Science Research Council, and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2003 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. 

Troutt Powell is now working on a book about the visual culture of slavery in the Middle East which will explore the painting and photography about African and Circassian slavery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is also a professor in the department of Africana Studies.  

Office Hours
Thursdays 1-4pm
Online Office Hours

Tuesdays 1:00PM-3:00PM

Courses Taught
  • HIST 081 History of the Middle East since 1800
  • HIST 106 Religion, Revolution and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East
  • HIST 189 Modern Egypt
  • HIST 216 Filming the Middle East
  • HIST 371 Africa and the Mid-East