Dr John-Paul Ghobrial

I am an Associate Professor of Early Modern History, and a Fellow of Balliol College.  Currently, I am also the Principal Investigator of an ERC-funded research project called ‘Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World’ (2015-2020).  My first book, The Whispers of Cities, explored how information flows connected Istanbul, London and Paris in the seventeenth century.  More recently, my published work includes a handful of articles on Eastern Christians in early modern Europe and the history of record-keeping in the Ottoman Empire.  I am now at work on a second book entitled Leaving Babylon, which tells the story of the first Arabic account of the New World (written by a priest from Mosul who travelled to Peru in the late seventeenth century). In general, I tend to be interested in microhistory, global history and the history of communication.  You can read more about my research here.