2008-2009 Visiting Scholar
James Onley
James Onley is Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, England. He was previously Assistant Professor of Gulf History at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. He specializes in the history, society, and culture of the Gulf Arab states and holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford (2001), where he studied at St. Antony’s College. Before joining academia, James Onley served in the Canadian Army for twelve years and was a UN peacekeeper in Iraq at the end of the Iran-Iraq War.
He is the author of The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth Century Gulf (Oxford University Press, 2007) and has articles/chapters in New Arabian Studies (2004), Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2004), Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf (2005), Journal of Social Affairs (2005), Maghreb-Machrek (2006), History and Anthropology (2006), and The Gulf Family: Modernity and Kinship Policies (2007). He is the recipient of dissertation awards from both the Middle East Studies Association of North America (2001) and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (2002).