Keith David Watenpaugh is an historian and Associate Professor of Modern Islam, Human Rights, Peace in the Religious Studies Program. Educated at UCLA, he has lived and conducted research in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq.

His recently published: Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) and his articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Social History, and Middle East Report

His current research focuses on the intersection of the international human rights régime, Islam and colonialism in the 20th century Arab Middle East.
He is also completing an edited volume: The Arab Intellectual and Question of Modernity, which gathers together essays by a leading group of younger scholars of the history of thought and ideas in the Arab world.

He has received several noteworthy grants including the CIEE Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council and Will Rogers fellowships; he was an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Middle East Studies at Williams College and in 2005-2006 he was the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Democracy and Diversity at the Tanner Humanities Center, Univ. of Utah. While at Le Moyne College, he authored a successful US Department of Education Title VI A grant which established the college’s Peace and Global Studies program, and for three years, he served as the program’s associate director.