Rate My Professor Benjamin Reilly

Benjamin Reilly, Ph.D., is an Associate Teaching Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, where he joined as one of the original faculty members in 2004 and remains the longest-serving faculty member. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. In his teaching role, Reilly offers a diverse array of courses at CMU-Q, including World History, Europe and the Islamic World, 18th-Century Europe, Disastrous Encounters, and Inward Odyssey. The latter course is frequently delivered through teleconferencing, linking students on the Pittsburgh and Qatar campuses to foster collaborative learning across geographies. His pedagogical approaches incorporate tools like concept maps for assessing student understanding in world history courses.

Reilly's scholarship focuses on environmental history, with emphasis on the environmental history of the Arabs and the Arabian Peninsula, the French Revolution, and the overseas branch campus phenomenon, including technological solutions to connect main and branch campuses. He is the author of six books: Tropical Surge: A History of Ambition and Disaster on the Florida Shore (2005), Disaster and Human History: Case Studies in Nature, Society, and Catastrophe (2009), Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula (2015), Arabian Travellers, 1800–1950: An Analytical Bibliography, Disasters in World History (2024), and Endemics, Epidemics, and Pandemics in World History (2025, Routledge). His peer-reviewed articles on the French Revolution have appeared in journals such as Social Science History and French History. Reilly's work surveys the development of disaster studies, presents historical case studies of nature-society-catastrophe interactions, and traces human encounters with diseases from the Stone Age to COVID-19, contributing substantially to world history and environmental historiography through analytical bibliographies and interdisciplinary analyses.