Department of History
Coor Hall - 4th Floor
Arizona State University
P.O.Box 874302
Tempe, AZ 85287
Phone: 480-965-5778
Fax: 480-965-0310 Department Email: history@asu.edu Advising Email: historyadvisor@asu.edu Graduate Email: Graduate.History@asu.edu
Professor Adelson's publications include three books: Mark Sykes: Portrait of an Amateur (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), London and the Invention of the Middle East, Money, Power, and War, 1902-1922 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), and Speaking of History: Conversations with Historians, 1990-1995 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996). Adelson is completing a book on Winston Churchill and the Middle East, 1905-1955, and has started another on Truman to Bush: The Middle East and the U.S. Presidency. Adelson has also published over 100 articles, essays, and reviews in scholarly journals; he has edited more than 5,000 pages of scholarly history for The Historian; he has presented some 50 papers at scholarly meetings in the United States and abroad.
Teaching Interests and Courses
Professor Adelson received his B.A. degree with honors from George Washington University, his B.Litt. from Oxford University, his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University, St. Louis, where he held a graduate Danforth Fellowship. He was an Alistair Horne Research Fellow at Oxford and taught briefly at Harvard before joining the Arizona State University faculty in 1974.
At Arizona State University, Adelson has taught undergraduate course in Modern British, Global, and Middle Eastern History, as well as graduate-level comparative courses and research seminars. Chair of over 30 honor's master's and doctoral committees, he has received awards for outstanding teaching and mentoring from the History Department, the Honor's College, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Arizona State University, and Advanced Placement.
After 9/11/01, for the Arizona State University President's Committee on Community Enrichment, Professor Adelson offered two 6-week courses on Islam and the World, and the Middle East since the 1970s. He has also been a lecturer at Washington University; the University of Arizona, Tucson; the American Graduate School of International Management, Glendale, Arizona; Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; and the Dante Alighieri School, Florence, Italy.
Professional Service Activities
Professor Adelson has addressed over 100 groups locally, nationally, and internationally, and has consulted with the media on all these levels, advised private and public officials and institutions about the Modern Middle East and the Islamic World. He is affiliated with and held offices in a variety of academic, civic, honorary, and professional organizations. Traveling extensively on most of the continents of the world for over four decades, Adelson resides near Arizona State University in Tempe, where his hobbies are collecting art, entertaining, and gardening, as well as cycling, hiking, and swimming.
