Lama Elsharif

Lama Elsharif is a historian of the early modern and modern Middle East and North Africa whose work rethinks Mediterranean history from the perspective of Ottoman North Africa. Her research explores how the intersections of environmental crises, political instability, and imperial change shaped the region’s maritime practices and cross-regional connections. Drawing on North African, Ottoman, and European sources, her current book project, “Small Wars of Scarcity: North African Corsairing in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” argues that North African corsairing—often dismissed as opportunistic piracy—functioned as a state strategy for survival amid drought, famine, and epidemics. Lama holds a PhD in History from Purdue University, where she was awarded the 2024 College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Dissertation Award. Her work also received honorable mention for the 2024 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award from the Middle East Studies Association. Before joining the Mahindra Humanities Center, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn’s Wolf Humanities Center. Her writing has appeared in The Markaz Review, and she has published a chapter on Tunisian corsairing in an edited volume with Amsterdam University Press. She is also a co-author of a forthcoming chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Mediterranean History.