Chloe Bordewich
Visiting Assistant Professor of Public History
Affiliation: Visiting
Education: AB Princeton University; MA, PhD Harvard University
Research Areas: Public history; Modern Middle East; Media; Surveillance; Trust; Migration and diaspora
Chloe Bordewich is Visiting Assistant Professor of Public History at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is a historian of media, migration, and empire in the modern Middle East with a strong interest in global public humanities. Her research has focused especially on the circulation of news, leaks, and rumor, and on the relationship between surveillance and social (dis)trust. She is currently at work on a book entitled Facts or Fakes?: Empire, Authoritarianism, and the Struggle for Information Justice in Modern Egypt, which traces the emergence of a public “right to know” among journalists, lawyers, and anticolonial activists in 19th- and 20th-century Egypt.
Bordewich holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University and was a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo. Before coming to NYUAD, she held postdoctoral fellowships in public history at the US National Archives (with Boston University) and in new media and digital humanities at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute. There, she wrote a bilingual (Arabic/English) play, Paradise Expressway, set amid demolitions in Cairo’s City of the Dead. She is also the co-founder of the Boston Little Syria Project, an urban public history initiative dedicated to preserving and disseminating the history of Boston’s first Arabic-speaking neighborhood in collaboration with the community’s descendants.
Recent research has appeared in the Journal of American Ethnic History, Jerusalem Quarterly, and the volume Arab American Public History (Temple, 2026), as well as New Lines Magazine and Al-Jumhuriya. Bordewich also translates fiction and memoir from Arabic. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Orient-Institut Istanbul, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Leventhal Map and Education Center, the Mellon Foundation, and various research fellowships at Harvard University.