Leila Fawaz is a Lebanese historian and academician.
She is the founding director of The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies from 2001 to 2012.
[1] Fawaz was born in Sudan to Greek-Orthodox Lebanese parents and raised in Lebanon.
[2][3][4][5] From 1990 to 1994, Fawaz was the editor-in-chief of The International Journal of Middle East Studies, where she advanced conducting analytical and comparative research, with an international and cross-disciplinary approach.
[6] She bemoaned the overspecialization within the field, the neglect of attention to humanities/arts and, uninteresting writing, and linked these problems to Middle East studies as a whole, because researchers were "still a long way from being pathfinders in the world of scholarship generally.