Kate Pukhovaia is Assistant Professor in Ottoman Studies at Utrecht University. She is a historian of the pre-modern Middle East specializing in the early modern (14th - 18th centuries) socio-political history of the Arab world. Her research interests include the comparative study of pre-modern state institutions and political elites in the Middle East as well as the history of Arabia in its regional context. 

Her current research project, "Early Modern State Development in Yemen" is funded by Horizon-2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions program and hosted at the Institue for Area Studies, Leiden University. It questions how the state and political elites developed in Yemen in the 13th-17th centuries, and what role the first period of Ottoman rule (1538-1635) played in the transformation of regional political and social structures.

Before coming to Utrecht, she was a fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute (2021-2022). She received her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and her BA and MA at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University.