Stories of Survival is a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council (2015-20), directed by Dr John-Paul Ghobrial, and based at the University of Oxford.
The project investigates the history of Eastern Christianity from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. From Lebanese immigrants in Argentina to Iraqi refugees in Sweden, Eastern Christians can be found today scattered across the entire world. Too often, however, this global migration has been seen purely as a modern development, one arising from contemporary political and confessional events in the Middle East, while in fact this phenomenon had its roots in the early modern period. From the sixteenth century onwards, Christians from the Ottoman Empire set out for distant worlds and foreign lands, travelling as far as Europe, India, Russia, and even the Americas and leaving traces of themselves in countless European and Middle Eastern archives, chanceries, and libraries.
Stretching across three continents, ten languages, and dozens of archives, Stories of Survival gathers all of these disparate sources into a single analytical frame to uncover, for the first time, the global and connected histories of Eastern Christianity in the early modern world.
This website showcases the ongoing research of our team of researchers based at Oxford. We encourage you to discover more about our work using the links above.
