Benjamin Geer’s research has focused on Egypt, and has used sociology and cognitive linguistics to study the history of nationalist concepts in Arabic. He has been Visiting Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Center at the American University in Cairo, done post-doctoral research in the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore, and taught Arabic at the University of Tübingen. He is now a Research Fellow in the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Basel, where he develops software to facilitate long-term preservation and reuse of digitised primary sources and research data in the humanities. He is currently working on a book on nationalism, and is planning a study on the concept of ‘the West’ in contemporary social science.