Eve M. Troutt Powell teaches the history of the modern Middle East. As a cultural historian, she emphasizes the exploration of literature and film in her courses. She is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003) and the co-editor, with John Hunwick, of The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton Series on the Middle East, Markus Wiener Press, 2002). She has also written a number of articles on the history of African slavery in the Nile valley, and on Saint Josephine Bakhita, a former Sudanese slave canonized in 2000.
Troutt Powell received her B.A, M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Prior to coming to Penn, she taught for ten years at The University of Georgia. She has received fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt and the Social Science Research Council, and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2003 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Troutt Powell is now working on a book about the memory of slavery in the Nile valley, which examines how slaves and slaveholders wrote, sang or talked about the experience of servitude and its meaning in their societies. Both her research and her teaching explore the relationship between Africa and the Middle East, and thus connect her closely to Africana Studies and African Studies at Penn.
Middle East
History