Simon is Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Birmingham, where he directs the Centre for Modern & Contemporary History. He is a historian of colonial empire with a special focus on the Middle East and the Mediterranean in the twentieth century. He has worked on the discourse and politics of economic development in the French League of Nations Mandate in Syria and Lebanon, on the history of Fordism in the post-Ottoman Middle East, and on the global history of colonial commodities and natural resources.
With the support of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, Simon is currently completing a book on the global political economy of French rule in Syria and Lebanon after World War One, and co-editing another, forthcoming with Routledge in 2018, on the interrelationship of the League of Nations and the United Nations. His new project uncovers the origins of the global food production system in late colonial rule.