Nader Atassi

Nader Atassi is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. His work focuses on the history of capitalism and economic thought in the modern Middle East. His dissertation project, titled "'Our Economic Nahda': Capital, Empire, and Economic Thought in the Modern Middle East," is a social history of economic ideas in the late Ottoman Arab East. Beginning with Ottoman-Arab Tanzimat intellectuals in the 1860s and ending with political parties during the Second Constitutional Era, the dissertation examines the elaboration and mobilization of economic ideas in the context of local and regional developments such as peasant revolt, Ottoman state reform, increasing public debt, and ascendant European imperialism. It shows how intellectuals, statesmen, and political factions increasingly conceptualized political reform and economic transformation within the framework of the new "science" of political economy.  His dissertation research has previously been supported by the American Research Institute in Turkey. He has previously served as a preceptor for Contemporary Civilization in Columbia's Core Curriculum.