Timothy Mitchell
Timothy P. Mitchell is a British born political scientist and student of the Arab world. He is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. He was previously Professor of Politics at New York University.
Biography
Mitchell received his B.A. from Cambridge University in 1977 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1984.
Mitchell is married to Lila Abu-Lughod, a Columbia University anthropology and gender studies professor.
Academic career
Mitchell arrived in the United States in 1977 to start a Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton. He was "surprised to discover that the Politics Department at Princeton was teaching the same old positivism. I was interested in the politics of the Arab world, having traveled there several times, so I evaded political science by taking courses in Middle Eastern history and Arabic language and spent three of the next six years studying and researching in Cairo. Meanwhile, Discipline and Punish had just appeared in English and Orientalism came out a year later. I read these against the Marx I had studied as an undergraduate, and moved on to Derrida and Heidegger, all of which informed the book I eventually produced, Colonising Egypt."
