Aline Schlaepfer – – UNIGE

Associate professor
Faculty of Letters
Arabic unit

Doctor of Letters from the University of Geneva (2012), Aline Schlaepfer was a visiting doctoral student at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (2009). Postdoctoral mobility also took her to the American University of Beirut (2016), then to Princeton University (2017). She is also an assistant professor at UNIGE until 2020. Between 2020 and 2024, Aline Schlaepfer is an assistant professor at the University of Basel at the Near and Middle East Studies Seminar (Nahoststudien), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. His project entitled “Ottoman afterlife in Jordan and Iraq. Politics of remembering and forgetting in new Arab states” (2020-2025) focuses on questions of memories, legacies and continuities with the Ottoman Empire in post-Ottoman Arab contexts (Turkey , Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan).

Aline Schlaepfer is the author of The Jewish intellectuals of Baghdad: Discourses and allegiances (1908-1951) and Troubles in contemporary Iraqi history. Talib al-Naqib and ‘Abd al-Mushin al-Sa’dun (text in Arabic, trans. by Mahmoud al-Qaysi of the University of Baghdad). She is currently working on a monograph entitled Ottoman Afterlives. Memory and History-Writing in Iraq after the Empire. This project focuses on how Ottoman history is used by Arab intellectuals to challenge the new political order established by European colonial powers in the post-Ottoman Middle East, particularly in British Mandate Iraq. His work focuses on the intellectual, social and political history of the Ottoman Empire in Arab spaces, the history of Jewish-Arab, Arab-Turkish relations, nationalisms and minorities in Arab and Muslim contexts between the 19th and 21st centuries, particularly in Iraq and Lebanon.

Aline Schlaepfer is appointed associate professor in September 2024 at UNGE, with teaching on contemporary Iraq, minorities in the Middle East, and modern Arab memoirs and autobiographies.