Dr Stephen Pascoe

Stephen Pascoe is a historian of cities, infrastructure, population and imperialism who works primarily on the modern Middle East and the global French Empire. He received a BA (Hons) in History and Arabic from the University of Melbourne in 2004, an MPhil in Urban Planning from the Melbourne School of Design in 2011 and a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine in 2019. Between 2021 and 2024, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Laureate Centre for History and Population at UNSW. Prior to coming to UNSW, Stephen was a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.

His forthcoming monograph Contested Concessions: The Struggle for Infrastructural Sovereignty in Syria, examines the paths by which foreign-capitalized infrastructure companies in French Mandate Syria became the targets of popular discontent, critique and boycott. A second book project, an intellectual history of population in the Middle East and North Africa, charts the history of population as an object of state-formation, policy and debate in the Middle East and North Africa since the late eighteenth century while interrogating in turn how the region has figured in global discourses about population.

He co-edited Making Modernity from the Mashriq to the Maghreb (2015), a collection of essays on the contested meanings of modernity in the Middle East, and has published in Radical History Review, Arena, Al Jazeera, Jadaliyya, and The Conversation.

Stephen is an Associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW, and in partnership with members of the Syrian community in Australia (SANADS, or the Syrian Australian Network of Detainees and Survivors) is involved with a forthcoming oral history project Documenting Detention: Stories of Syrian Prison Detainees in Australia.