Ussama Makdisi

Ussama Makdisi (born 1968) is an American historian specializing in the history of the modern Middle East. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the Chancellor's Chair, May Ziadeh Chair in Palestinian and Arab Studies.

Early life

Ussama Makdisi was born in 1968 in Washington, D.C., and is of Palestinian Christian and Lebanese Christian descent. He received a B.A. degree from Wesleyan University in 1990 and his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 1997.

Academic career

Makdisi's research focuses on the cultural and political history of the Middle East, with emphasis on identity, sectarianism, nationalism, and modernity. In 1997, he became the inaugural Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has also served as a visiting professor at the American University of Beirut and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.

From 2012 to 2013, he was a resident fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. In 2018, he was awarded the Berlin Prize.

Books

• Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (University of California Press, 2019)
• Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs, 2010)
• Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008)
• The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000)
• co-editor Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana University Press, 2006)

References