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In this book talk, Febe Armanios will present on her recently-published monograph Satellite Ministries, which explores how modern expressions of faith, technology, and political power intersected and clashed across the Global South and beyond through the analysis of sixteen Christian television channels in the Middle East. In 1981, a satellite television station called Star of Hope began broadcasting from Israeli-occupied South Lebanon. Later renamed Middle East Television (METV), its programming included American soap operas, sports, and evangelical content alongside innovative Arabic Christian televangelism. METV spurred the growth of competing Christian broadcasters and reshaped the Middle East's media and religious landscape over the next four decades. Through extensive fieldwork and archival research, Febe Armanios explores how Western evangelicals and indigenous Christians harnessed terrestrial and satellite technologies to promote Christian television in the Middle East.
Febe Armanios is the Philip Battell and Sarah Frances Cowles Stewart Professor of History at Middlebury College. Her research focuses on Middle Eastern Christian communities, particularly Egypt’s Copts, with interests in comparative religious practices, food history, and media studies. She is the author of Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2025), Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2011), and co-author, with Boǧaç Ergene, of Halal Food: A History (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is founding co-director of Middlebury College’s Axinn Center for the Humanities, and she currently co-edits, with Angie Heo, a book series titled “Coptic Studies in Historical and Cultural Context” published by the American University in Cairo Press.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies