Warm Welcome to our New Faculty Member, Laura Frances Goffman

Assistant Professor of Health Studies of the Middle East and North Africa.

Laura Frances Goffman is a historian of health in the modern Middle East. Her research focuses on the intersections of public health, empire, state building, and social change in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. She is committed to bringing the Gulf region into discussions of world history, especially narratives of how migration, gender, citizenship, and state formation intersect with the movement of disease.

Goffman was awarded the 2019 Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Dissertation Award. She holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University and was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the project “The Lifetimes of Epidemics in Europe and the Middle East” at the University of Oslo in 2019-2020.  

At the University of Arizona, Goffman teaches courses on the history of the Modern Middle East; on the history of health, medicine, and disease in the Middle East; and on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf from the nineteenth century to the present.

Welcome to the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Laura!