Dylan Baun was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is a lover of all history. His specific interest in the Middle East and Islamic world began when he visited Egypt as an impressionable undergraduate history major at Wittenberg University and continued as he studied Arabic and conducted archival research in Lebanon during his Ph.D. training at the University of Arizona.
Dylan is a historian of the modern Middle East with a focus on youth and young people in 20th-century Lebanon and Palestine. His research focuses on young men and women in this era and region, especially the identities they forge through their engagement in political organizations, social movements, protests, revolutions, and wars. Dylan's first book, Winning Lebanon: Youth Politics, Populism, and the Production of Sectarian Violence, 1920-1958 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), is a history of multiple youth organizations and parties across the French colonial and early independence eras, culminating in the 1958 war. His second book, Beirut Radical: A Global Microhistory from the Sixties to the Lebanese Civil War (forthcoming with I.B. Tauris), takes up a single Lebanese young person of this era as a window into 1960s youth activism, war, and memory today.
Dylan brings these specific interests into the classroom, where he asks students to consider how “ordinary” people and their actions shape specific historical phenomena, whether a civil war or a literary movement. At the same time, his students explore how given events and trends shape the lives of these people as they experience them. Hence, Dylan challenges his students to strike this balance, with people as makers of historical events, but also products of these events. He finds this approach important for all historical inquiry, but especially in the case of the Middle East, where people have been written out of grand historical narratives, contemporary media reports, and foreign policy as if they were merely victims or pawns.
In Dylan’s classes, students learn about the lives of children, women, and men in Middle Eastern, Islamic, and World history. Throughout any given semester, Dylan and his students practice understanding them, writing about them, and relating to them.