Jonathan Wyrtzen is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. He was born and grew up in Texas and received his BA in Plan II Honors Liberal Arts at the University of Texas-Austin. He studied in Palestine-Israel at Haifa University and Hebrew University Jerusalem, then completed an MA in Middle East Studies at UT-Austin. After teaching at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, he completed a PhD in Modern Middle East History at Georgetown University. He joined the faculty of Yale University in 2009.
He is the author of two books, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Cornell, 2015) and Worldmaking the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (Columbia, 2022). He is active in the Middle East Studies Association, American Institute for Maghrib Studies (previously serving as Vice-President), and American Sociological Association (currently Chair-Elect for the Comparative-Historical Section).
Jonathan Wyrtzen is a historical sociologist whose research engages a set of related thematic areas that include empire and colonialism, state formation and non-state forms of political organization, ethnicity and nationalism, and religion and socio-political action.
His work focuses on society and politics in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly with regards to interactions catalysed by the expansion of European empires into this region.
His first book, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Cornell University Press, 2015; 2016 Social Science History Association President’s Book Award winner) examines how European colonial intervention in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed.
His second book project, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2022; 2023 Guicciardini Prize in Historical International Relations, Honourable Mention), re-examines how the First World War unmade the greater Ottoman political order that had shaped the Middle East for centuries and opened up the possibility for local and European actors to reimagine political identities and political futures within the region. It demonstrates that, instead of an imperial drawing room, it was in and through violent clashes on the ground among competing local and colonial projects during the latter phases of the Long Great War in the 1920s-30s that the Middle East’s states, boundaries, and identities were remade.
He is currently starting up a third book project, tentatively titled Nation in Empire, that explores how spatial and symbolic boundaries of political and social inclusion/exclusion are recurrently drawn and contested. The project focuses on two central cases—the United States and France—tracing out their entwined histories of overland and overseas imperial expansion (including the Caribbean/Americas, Africa/Middle East, East and Southeast Asia) and contraction have patterned long-running struggles over “national” identities and the apportionment of rights.
Research Specialisations- Empire and colonialism
- Middle East and North Africa
- Political Identity
- Ethnicity and Nationalism
- Comparative / Global History
BOOKS
2022. Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East, New York: Columbia University Press.
*Honorable mention, Guicciardini Prize in Historical International Relations, International Studies Association
2015. Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
*Winner of 2016 Social Science History Association President’s Book Award
ARTICLES
Wyrtzen, J. 2017. “Colonial War and the Production of Territorialized State Space in North Africa,” Political Power and Social Theory, 33:151-173.
Wyrtzen, J. 2017. “Colonial Legitimization-Legibility Linkages and the Politics of Identity in Algeria and Morocco,” European Journal of Sociology, 58(2):205-235.
Wyrtzen, J. 2013. “Performing the Nation in Anti-Colonial Protest in Interwar Morocco,” Nations and Nationalism, 19 (4):615-34.
Guhin, J. & J. Wyrtzen. 2013. “The Violences of Knowledge: Edward Said, Sociology, and Post-Orientalist Reflexivity,” Political Power and Social Theory, 24:231-262.
Wyrtzen, J. 2011. “Colonial State-Building and the Negotiation of Arab and Berber Identity in Protectorate Morocco,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2): 227-249.
CHAPTERS
Wyrtzen, J. 2023. “Middle Eastern and North African Nationalisms.” In Matthew D’Auria, Cathie Carmichael, & Aviel Roshwald (Eds.) Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (refereed)
Wyrtzen, J. 2022. “Relational History, the Long Great War, and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” In Natana Delong-Bas (Ed.) Islam, Revival, and Reform: Redefining Tradition for the Twenty-First Century. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. (refereed)
Wyrtzen, J. 2018. “The Commander of the Faithful and Moroccan Secularity.” In Mirjiam Kuenkler, John Madeley, & Shylashri Shankar (Eds.) A Secular Age Beyond the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (refereed)
Wyrtzen, J. 2014. “Colonial Legacies, National Identity, and Challenges for Multiculturalism in the Contemporary Maghreb.” In Moha Ennaji (ed.) Multiculturalism and Democracy in North Africa: Aftermath of the Arab Spring (pp. 17-34). London: Routledge. (refereed)
Wyrtzen, J. 2013. “National resistance, amazighité, and (re-)imagining the nation in Morocco.” In Driss Maghraoui (Ed.), Revisiting the colonial past in Morocco (pp. 184-99). New York: Routledge.
- Empire, Nation, and Decolonisation
- Social Movements in Muslim Majority Societies
