Diane Robinson-Dunn

Degrees

• Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook

Biography

Diane Robinson-Dunn is an historian and scholar who specializes in the creation of culture, or systems of meaning, in the context of fluctuating imperial and national borders from northern Europe to the South Asian subcontinent, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Particular areas of interest include England, France, north Africa and the Middle East. She received her Ph.D. from Stony Brook University and studied Arabic at the Arabic Language Institute, American University in Cairo. Her first book The Harem, Slavery and British Imperial Culture, was published in English by Manchester University press in 2006, 2014 and published in French, Le harem, l’esclavage et la culture impériale britannique: Les relations anglo-musulmanes à la fin du XXe siècle, by Les Presses Pluridisciplinaires de L’Université. Grenoble Alpes in 2018 explores the national and gender politics surrounding the British antislavery movement in Egypt and new Muslim communities in England, 1870-1900. Her second and current book-length project is entitled Universalist religious movements and nationalist debates: Bahá’ís, Muslims, and Jews in Britain’s eastwardly expanding empire during the first world war.

Other publications include the introduction to Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt (Gorgias Press, 2010); 'Fairer to the Ladies and of Benefit to the Nation’: William Henry Quilliam on reforming English society by Islamizing gender relationships, in Victorian Muslim: Abdullah Quilliam and Islam and the West (Oxford University Press, 2017) and French and English Orientalisms and the study of slavery and abolition in North Africa and the Middle East: what are the connections in Slavery in the Islamic World its Characteristics and Commonality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Robinson-Dunn is a lifetime member and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London, a member and contributor to le Groupe de recherche Achac, Paris, and is the faculty leader and director of the university’s international experience in India.