Dahlia E. M. Gubara is an intellectual historian with an interest in the histories of knowledge production, religion, law, and race and slavery. Trained as a historian of Islam, the Middle East, and Africa, her work draws primarily on Arabic sources while engaging with the global circulation of European intellectual currents. Her research evolves from a longstanding interest in the production, transmission and translation of concepts across time and space, and is principally concerned with the production and transmission of knowledge in, and about, the Islamic tradition, classical to modern.

She is completing a book manuscript entitled The Impossible University: al-Azhar between Islamic Tradition and Colonial Modernity, which examines transformations in knowledge making in the early modern to modern periods through the history of al-Azhar: the mosque-college in Cairo often described as the foremost Islamic University and ones of the oldest centers of learning in the world. She is also developing a second project, Virtuous Narratives: The Many Lives of Luqman al-Hakim, which explores the layered representations of a polymorphous figure and his significance to the concept of ‘hikmah’ (knowledge-wisdom-gnosis) across diverse religious, philosophical and literary texts and traditions.

Dahlia holds a BA in law from SOAS, University of London, and an MPhil and PhD from Columbia University’s Department of History. Her doctoral research was supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the Doris G. Quinn Foundation. Before joining King’s College, she taught at Koç University, Istanbul and the American University of Beirut (AUB). She has held postdoctoral positions at the Andrew Mellon Center for Arts and Humanities (AUB) and the Orient-Institut Beirut, and has been a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Law of the University of Cape Town, the Department of Asian, African and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Naples L’Orientale; the Centre for Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies at University of Bergen; and the American Research Center in Egypt.

Research interests and PhD supervision

History of Middle East and Africa: Islamic studies, comparative intellectual history, history of religion, Islamic law and ethics; history of education; race and slavery

Teaching

6AAH3109 Towards Non-Orientalist Genealogies: A Survey of Islamic Intellectual History (600-1800 A.D)
5AAH1101 The Seen and Unseen: Themes in Global Intellectual History
5AAH1001, History of Western Political Ideas (From Plato to c.1700)
5AAH1002, History of Western Political Ideas (c. 1700 to the present)
4AAH0003 Early Modern Worlds (Module Convenor)

Selected publications

"The Caliphate is Dead! Long Live the Caliphate: Authority and Succession in the Wake of Empire", Guest Edited Special Issue, European Journal of Turkish Studies (forthcoming 2026)

“Contested Geographies: Travel and Translation between the Darfur Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (in print)

“Adab as a Way of Life: Towards an Ethical Turn in History,” Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 53, no. 3-4 (2022): 195-215

“Muḥammad al-Kashnawī and the Everyday Life of the Occult,” in Ousmane O. Kane (ed.) Islamic Scholarship in Africa. New Directions and Global Contexts (James Currey; Boydell & Brewer, 2021): pp. 41-60. [French Translation: “Muḥammad al-Kashnāwī et le quotidien de l’occulte,” in Ousmane O. Kane (ed. trans.) Erudition islamique en Afrique. Nouvelles Pistes de recherche et contexte mondial (Dakar: CERDIS, 2021): pp. 40-60]

“Revisiting Race and Slavery through Abd al-Rahman al-Jabati’s ‘Ajai’b al-athar,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 38, no. 2, (2018): 230-245