Department of History

Dr. Elizabeth Perego is a cultural historian of the modern Middle East and Africa. Her work examines the intersection of gender, politics, and culture in the Maghreb, with a focus on contemporary Algeria. Through her courses on Islamic, Middle Eastern, and North African pasts, Dr. Perego seeks to immerse students in past cultures and societies. She embraces an active learning approach to the classroom, pushing students to engage directly with artifacts from the past to make sense of how communities from across these geographic regions lived and interacted. Ever attentive to the need for inclusive learning, Dr. Perego’s classes foreground diverse voices and scholarship from the Middle East and North Africa. She further encourages students to consider a number of methodologies and theories that historians use to recover the rich landscapes of past worlds and societies, showing them the value of “thinking historically“ in today’s changing and increasingly-interconnected world.