May Fatté Davie
May Davie is a Lebanese and French historian and scholar specializing in urban history, religious architecture, and socio-political structures in the Middle East. She is a professor at the University of Balamand and serves as the director of the Department of Religious Heritage: Art and Architecture at the university’s Institute of History, Archaeology, and Near Eastern Studies. She also serves as the director of the ARPOA laboratory at the University of Balamand in Lebanon.
Education
Davie earned her Bachelor of Economics from Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut in 1973, followed by a Master’s in History from the same institution in 1987. She completed her Doctorate in History at Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne in 1993 under the supervision of. During her doctoral studies, she also pursued advanced training at Université d’Aix-en-Provence in 1991.Career
Davie began her career as a lecturer in economics at the University of Constantine, Algeria, teaching microeconomics, macroeconomics, and accounting. In 1993, she joined Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut as a lecturer in urban history. Since 1992, Davie has been a professor at the Urbanism Institute of the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut. She has also held positions as an associate researcher at URBAMA at the Université de Tours in France from 1992 to 2001 and at the Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain in Beirut from 1996 to 1997. In 1998, she became the director of the journal Chronos at the University of Balamand. Since 2004, she has led the Religious architecture of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch laboratory at the same university. Her association with Centre Tourangeau d'Histoire et d'études des Sources at the University of Tours began in 2011.Davie's research primarily focuses on Lebanese national identity and heritage, and the management of religious spaces in Beirut. She has been involved in various projects, such as studying the religious heritage of Tripoli, Lebanon, and examining the transformation of places of worship and urban recomposition in Beirut from the 19th century until the establishment of the Lebanese Republic.