Background

Heather J. Sharkey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at the University of Pennsylvania. 

She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University after conducting research abroad on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. As the recipient of a Marshall scholarship from the British government, she earned an M.Phil. degree in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Durham in England.  She also earned a B.A. in Anthropology, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale University.  Before joining the Penn faculty in 2002, she taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Trinity College in Connecticut.

Research

Dr. Sharkey’s first book, entitled Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, appeared from the University of California Press in 2003. Her second book, entitled American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire, appeared from Princeton University Press in 2008.  The Carnegie Corporation, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation supported the latter project.  With Mehmet Ali Doğan, she has co-edited a volume entitled, American Missionaries in the Middle East: Foundational Encounters (University of Utah Press, forthcoming).  Dr. Sharkey is currently working on a book for Cambridge University Press about the history of intercommunal relations in the modern Middle East.

Dr. Sharkey’s articles have appeared in several edited volumes, including Proselytization Revisited: Rights, Free Markets, and Culture Wars (2008), and Culture Wars (2008), Narrating the Nile: Politics, Cultures, Identities (2008), Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa (2006), Literature and Nation in the Middle East (2006), Globalization and the Muslim World (2004), and The Decolonization Reader (2003).   She has published in numerous periodicals, among them the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of African History, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Church History and African Affairs.  Dr. Sharkey is on the editorial advisory boards of The International Journal of African Historical Studies, the journal Church History and Religious Culture and Islamic Africa.