Keith David Watenpaugh

Keith David Watenpaugh is Professor of Human Rights Studies at the University of California, Davis and founding director of the university’s Human Rights Studies Program (2015-2025). Author of Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (University of California Press, 2015) and Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Social History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Humanity, and the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. An American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, he has received support for his scholarship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; he has been a residential scholar at the American Academy in Berlin and the American University of Beirut, and was awarded the Institute of International Education’s Centennial Medal for his work on behalf of refugee university students. He is completing a graphic novelization of Karnig Panian’s Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide for Stanford University Press and writing a human rights history of Syria 2011-2024.