Mattias Gori Olesen is a historian of the modern Middle East. His research focuses on the intellectual, religious, political and environmental ties of the Middle East into the Indian Ocean arena, especially to India, East Africa and Japan. 

Mattias received his PhD (2023) from Arab and Islamic Studies, Aarhus University. His dissertation focused on Arab and Egyptian cultural imaginations of the larger “Orient” in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and on how they were mobilized in service of pan-Eastern anticolonial political visions, connecting Egypt to particularly India and Japan. His subsequent postdoctoral project (2023-2025) at Aarhus University was part of the Constructing the Ocean: Indian Ocean Infrastructures and Thick Transregionalism (2021-2025) project and revolved around the Indian Ocean ties of the Da’udi Bohra Muslim community, connecting Cairo to Yemen, India, UAE, Tanzania and Kenya. Mattias’ subproject focused specifically on the Bohra community’s presence in Cairo and their restoration of medieval Fatimid monuments in the city as well as the replication of (neo-)Fatimid architecture in Bohra community infrastructure around the Indian Ocean.

Currently, Mattias is a research assistant on the transdisciplinary project, Monsoon Cultures (spring 2026), based at Aarhus University. In cooperation with researchers from the humanities and natural sciences in Denmark, Tanzania and India, the project examines how the monsoon affects cultures and ecosystems around the Western Indian Ocean in an era of climate change, with a focus on India, East Africa and the Arab world.