ICTS

Crossing Continents: Global Microhistory from Egypt and the Sudan
Bloomsbury Academic, 2026

Book Summary
In 1825, a giraffe boarded a boat at Sennar near the junction of the Blue and White Niles in the Sudan and sailed for Paris. In the next year, also at Sennar, a Kurdish cavalry officer named Mahu Bey Urfali, who represented the Muhammad Ali Pasha regime of Egypt, died of smallpox in a military encampment. What was a Kurd from Urfa, now in southeastern Turkey, doing in the Sudan? Why did a giraffe make the long trip to Paris? And how did a sleepy town 300 km southeast of Khartoum, once the capital of a Sudanese sultanate, figure in both their life journeys? The book answers such questions by exploring the stories of seven remarkable individuals. These include the giraffe, two soldiers, a medical doctor, a maharani, an archaeologist, and an accountant, whose mobile lives allow us to track global microhistory in the Nile Valley and the wider world while revealing a kaleidoscopic history of peoples, places, and ideas. Inviting us to look at past lives from many angles, the book asks: Who or what counts as important in history? Which historical details are worthy of our attention? And what sources can we find and assemble to tell meaningful stories about the past? The result is a learned but accessible study which will appeal to university-level students and scholars of Middle Eastern, African, and global history, and experts in the history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Nile Valley.

About the Speaker
Heather J. Sharkey is a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press, 2003); American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton University Press, 2008); A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Crossing Continents: Global Microhistory from Egypt and the Sudan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026). She has edited one volume and co-edited four others, including The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and Commensality and Cultural Heritage: Bringing the Foodways of the Middle East and Its Diasporas to the Table (Groningen University Press, 2025). For Edinburgh University Press, she edits the book series on “Food and Foodways in the Middle East, North Africa, and Their Diasporas.”
In the 2024-25 year, she was an Oliver Smithies Fellow in Balliol College at the University of Oxford.