About Alan Mikhail
Alan Mikhail, Chace Family Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University, is widely recognized for his work in Middle Eastern and global history.
His recent book God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and was named a book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement, History Today, Publishers Weekly, and Glamour.
He is the author of three previous books and over thirty scholarly articles that have received multiple awards in the fields of Middle Eastern and environmental history, including the Fuat Köprülü Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association for Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History and the Roger Owen Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association for Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History.
In 2018, he received the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for internationally distinguished humanities scholars and social scientists.
His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, and Time and was featured on Jeopardy!
Where to find Alan Mikhail
God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World
The history of the Ottoman Empire—once the most powerful state on earth, ruling over more territory and people than any other world power—has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and suppressed in the West.
With this “original and wide-ranging” (Wall Street Journal) global history, Alan Mikhail vitally recasts the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520). Drawing on previously unexamined sources, and upending prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories, Mikhail’s game-changing account radically transforms our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the annals of the modern world.