Dr. Saree Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, and the author of Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton, 2008; revised and updated, 2010). He is currently completing work on a book tentatively called Civilizing Empire: Race, Culture, and the Civilization of Britain, 1798-1870. He is also the co-editor of the volume The Arabian Nights in Historical Context (Oxford University Press, 2008), and of Marxism Beyond Marxism (Routledge, 1996).
Dr. Makdisi, who received his BA from Wesleyan University and his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University, is Editor of the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature, which is published by the University of California Press. He has published extensively in scholarly books as well as in academic journals such as Critical Inquiry.
He has also written a number of articles on contemporary events which have appeared in, among others, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Nation, The Huffington Post, The London Review of Books and the Beirut newspaper al-akhbar. He has spoken or appeared on the BBC World Service, National Public Radio, al-Jazeera, PBS, South African Broadcasting Corporation’s SAFM, Radio National in Australia, and others.
Maryse and Ramzy Mikhail Memorial Lecture 