Roger Owen is A.J.Meyer Professor (Emeritus) of Middle East History at Harvard University and a former director of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He previously taught Middle East political and economic history at Oxford University where he was also many times the Director of the St Antony's College Middle East Centre.
His books include Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, The Middle East in the World Economy: 1800-1914, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (3rd revised edition 2004) and Lord Cromer; Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul. He is also the co-author (with Sevket Pamuk) of A History of the Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century.
His most recent publication is The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life published by Harvard UP on 1 May 2012 - a political history of an era when most presidents were becoming more and more monarchical in their style ruler - which effectively came to an end with the revolutions of the ‘Arab spring’. He has written a regular column for the Arabic newspaper, Al-Hayat, since the late 1980s.