Arie M. Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies. Trained in Israel and the U.S., he is a historian of twentieth century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, decolonization and partition politics, and with a subsidiary interest in the history of Israeli popular culture. Prior to his arrival at GW, Dubnov taught at Stanford University and the University of Haifa. He was a G.L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a participant in the National History Center’s International Decolonization Seminar, and recipient of the Dorset Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a was Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford.
His publications include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (2012), and two edited volumes, Zionism – A View from the Outside (2010 [in Hebrew]), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory, and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-century Territorial Separatism (2019, co-edited with Laura Robson), tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition in the British interwar Imperial context and reconstructing the cross-border links connecting partition plans in Ireland, Palestine/Israel and India/Pakistan. Additionally, he has published numerous articles in leading journals in the field, including Nations & Nationalism, Modern Intellectual History, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Rethinking History, Jewish Social Studies, The Journal of Israeli History and more.
His current book research project, tentatively entitled Dreamers of the Third Empire/Temple, examines ties between Zionist and British imperial thinkers in interwar years and to uncover alternative, neglected federalist political schemes for the future of the region that were circulating at the time.