Dr Hugh Roberts gives a talk for the middle east studies centre seminar series. Dr Hugh Roberts is the Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA and a specialist on North African history and politics. He took up his post at Tufts in January 2012. For academic year 2015-2016 he was also the Simons Visiting Professor in Dialogue on International Law and Human Security at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Between 1976 and 1997 he lectured in the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and the Department of History at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London.

From 1997 to 2002 he was a Senior Research Fellow of the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has also worked outside academia, as an independent scholar and consultant on North African affairs and as Director of the International Crisis Group’s North Africa Project, based in Cairo, from 2002 to 2007 and again from February to July 2011. He is the author of The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002. Studies in a broken polity (Verso, 2003; p/b 2015); Berber Government: the Kabyle polity in pre-colonial Algeria (I.B. Tauris, 2014; p/b 2017) and Algérie-Kabylie: Études et interventions (Algiers, Éditions Barzakh, 2014).