Trustee Philip Khoury Named MIT Associate Provost

The president of the American University of Beirut (AUB), John Waterbury, announced that Vice-Chairman of the Board of Trustees Philip S. Khoury has been named associate provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The position is effective July 1. Dr. Khoury is the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at MIT.

Dr. Khoury has been a member of AUB's Board of Trustees since 1997. He joined the MIT history faculty as an assistant professor in 1981, was appointed professor in 1990, and then dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in 1991.

In his new position, Khoury will coordinate and develop MIT's cocurricular and nonacademic arts programs, as well as strengthen financial resources and infrastructure to promote the arts at the university. He will expand major interdepartmental educational, research, and community-based initiatives, and help to develop and implement a strategic plan for MIT's international initiatives.

Khoury is a former president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Historical Association and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, and chairman of the World Peace Foundation. He has also served as cochair of its Middle East Security Project.

A political and social historian of the Middle East, his current research focuses on war and society in the Middle East during World War II. His publications include Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism (Cambridge University Press); Syria and the French Mandate (Princeton University Press), which received the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize; and Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-war Reconstruction (Brill).