Toby Matthiesen

Toby Matthiesen is a Historian and Political Scientist with a focus on the Middle East and Global Islam. He teaches at the University of Bristol, has held academic positions at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and the LSE and has been a Marie Curie Global Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University and Stanford University. He is the author of several books, which have won numerous prizes. Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t (Stanford University Press, 2013) analysed the impact of the Arab Spring on the Gulf States, and their attempt to undermine the Arab Spring. The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) dealt with the relationship between Saudi Shia and the state since the early 20^th century and was based on fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and hitherto unused Arabic archives. His latest book, The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism (2023), a global history of Sunni-Shii relations and conflict, was published by Oxford University Press.

He is working on a new book, The Rise of the Gulf States, which tells the story of how the Arab Gulf States developed from minor port towns and a vast desert kingdom to regional powers with global ambitions. The Rise of the Gulf States is under contract with Penguin and Simon & Schuster.