Career Academia McDougall attended a comprehensive school in County Durham. He studied French, German, and Arabic at the University of St Andrews, then modern Middle Eastern history and politics at St Antony's College, Oxford. He was a junior research fellow at the Middle East Centre of St Antony's College, Oxford (2002–2004), then assistant professor of history at Princeton University (2004–2007) and lecturer in the history of Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2007–2009), before taking up a tutorial fellowship in modern history at Trinity College, Oxford, in 2009. He was awarded a professorial title in 2018. McDougall became an emeritus fellow of Trinity College in 2026, and remains active in research and graduate supervision as an associate member of the Faculty of History.
McDougall's research focuses on the history of North Africa and the French colonial empire.
In 2015, he supported an academic boycott of Israeli higher education institutions.
McDougall has written for The Guardian and Times Higher Education. In 2018, McDougall was involved in academic disagreement in Oxford with Nigel Biggar's controversial "Ethics and Empire" project.
Acting McDougall left his academic position at Oxford in 2025 to complete an MA in acting at the Arts Educational Schools in Chiswick. He acts under the stage name Jack Davidson.
Selected works Nation, society and culture in North Africa (Routledge, 2003) History and the culture of nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2006) Saharan frontiers: Space and mobility in northwest Africa with Judith Scheele (Indiana University Press, 2012) Global and local in Algeria and Morocco: The world, the state, and the village with Robert P. Parks (Routledge, 2015) A History of Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2017) Worlds of Islam: A Global History (Basic Books, 2026)
References
External links McDougall's profile at Trinity College McDougall's profile at the University of Oxford Faculty of History