He specializes in the history of Middle Eastern Christianity from the sixteenth century to the present; modern Catholicism and Catholic missions; and the Arab provinces of the late Ottoman Empire, especially Syria.
He completed his PhD dissertation, entitled, “Les Chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique”, under the supervision of the late Louis Châtellier in Nancy in 1993.
Les Chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme Catholique makes an important contribution to the study of confessionalization and sectarianism in the Ottoman Empire.
To write this story of the woman who had an “iron will”[4] for her times, Heyberger drew deeply upon archives in the Propaganda Fide in Rome – including records of inquisitions sent to investigate her – along with Maronite sources from the patriarchate in Bkiriki, Lebanon.
[5] Heyberger also wrote two books responding to the major challenges that have faced Middle Eastern Christian communities in the post-9/11 era, especially in light of social upheavals caused by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and, from 2011, the Syrian Civil War.
This book takes the story of Middle Eastern Christians into the early twenty-first century while commenting on the Islamist militant movement known as ISIS or Da’esh.
[1][1] With Paul Fahmé-Thiéry and Jérôme Lentin, Bernard Heyberger published in 2015 a French translation of the Arabic travelogue of Hanna Diyab of Aleppo, who visited Paris in 1708–1709.
Heyberger wrote the introduction to this volume, in which he suggested that Hanna Diyab may have modeled the character of Aladdin on himself, or vice versa – an idea which, in the words of a reviewer, "will no doubt keep a generation of scholars very busy.