I am a social and media historian of the Eastern Mediterranean. After many years at the Orient-Institut Beirut, Lebanon, I am running a scholarly makerspace at the central university library, Humboldt-Universität Berlin. I completed my Ph.D. with a thesis titled “To Whom Belong the Streets? Property, Propriety, and Appropriation: The Production of Public Space in Late Ottoman Damascus, 1875–1914” at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (2014). My current research aims at establishing a genealogy of urban food riots as a “repertoire of contention” (C.Tilly) and genuine political negotiations of the social contract between the rulers and the ruled in the Eastern Mediterranean between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. In addition, I developed a strong interest in digital humanities and the socio-linguistics of early Arabic newspapers. I am a co-organiser of the bi-annual “Digital Humanities Institute - Beirut” (since 2015) and the co-editor for the online chronology of Arabic periodicals until 1929 (Project Jarāʾid). In the framework of his research project “Open Arabic Periodical Editions” (OpenArabicPE), I work on open, collaborative and scholarly digital editions of early Arabic periodicals such as Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī’s journal al-Muqtabas and ʿAbd al-Qādir Iskandarānī’s al-Ḥaqāʾiq.

Location

Berlin

Disciplines

• Digital Humanities
• History
• Languages
• Urban Studies

Affiliation

Universität Hamburg, HU Berlin

Website

http://tillgrallert.github.io