Contact Information
309 Gregory Hall
810 S Wright, MC-466
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
Kenneth M. Cuno researches, teaches, and writes about the history of the modern Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in history at UCLA in 1985, and taught at the American University in Cairo before coming to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. He is the author of Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt (2015), which was awarded the Albert Hourani Book Prize by the Middle East Studies Association. Other recent books include Race and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans, co-edited with Terence Walz (2010); and Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia, co-edited with Manisha Desai (2009). He also authored the chapter on nineteenth-century Egypt in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 5 (2010).
Research Interests
Social, economic, and legal history of the modern Middle East; family history.
Education
Ph.D. UCLA 1985
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor Emeritus, History
Honors & Awards
Honorable Mention, Albert Hourani Book Prize, awarded by the Middle East Studies Association, for The Pasha's Peasants, 1993.
Albert Hourani Book Prize awarded by the Middle East Studies Association, for Modernizing Marriage, 2015.
Recent Publications
Cuno, K. M. (2019). Ismāʿīl Pasha. In K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas, & E. Rowson (Eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three (3 ed., Vol. 6, pp. 63-66). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_32608
Cuno, K. M. (2018). Modernizing Marriage in Egypt. In J. Moses (Ed.), Marriage, Law and Modernity (pp. 129-148). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474276139.0014
Cuno, K. M. (2017). Contextualizing Muhammad 'Abduh's views on the family, marriage, and divorce. In J. E. Lowry, & S. M. Toorawa (Eds.), Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett K. Rowson (pp. 375-392). (Islamic History and Civilization; Vol. 141). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004343290_022
Cuno, K. M. (2017). Marriage Practices: Egypt: Nineteenth to early Twentieth Century. In S. Joseph (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/1872-5309_ewic_COM_002124
Cuno, K. M. (2016). Reorganization of the Sharia courts of Egypt: How legal modernization set back women’s rights in the nineteenth century. In Law and Legality in the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey (pp. 92-107). Indiana University Press.