Osama Abi-Mershed is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses on North Africa, the Middle East, and the Western Mediterranean (medieval and modern); on Arab and Ottoman societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and on colonial and post-colonial Franco-Maghribi relations. His academic research focuses on the ideologies and practices of colonial modernization in nineteenth century Algeria, and on the parallel processes of state-and nation-making in France and North Africa.