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Cadenhead-Settle Lecture featuring Ussama Makdisi (UC-Berkeley)
February 3, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Free
Ussama Makdisi is a Palestinian American historian, specializing in the history of the modern Middle East.
He is May Ziadeh Chair in Palestinian & Arab Studies and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley. Makdisi is also faculty director for the Program in Palestinian & Arab Studies at UCB.
In April 2009, the Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a 2009 Carnegie Scholar as part of its effort to promote original scholarship regarding Muslim societies and communities, both in the United States and abroad. Makdisi was awarded the Berlin Prize and spent the spring 2018 semester as a fellow at the American Academy of Berlin.
Makdisi’s most recent book, “Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World,” was published in 2019 by the University of California Press. He is also the author of “Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001” (Public Affairs, 2010). His previous books include “Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East” (Cornell University Press, 2008), which was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies.
Makdisi is also the author of “The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon” (University of California Press, 2000) and co-editor of “Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa” (Indiana University Press, 2006).
He has published widely on Ottoman and Arab history as well as on U.S.-Arab relations and U.S. missionary work in the Middle East. Among his major articles are “Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: An Interpretation of Brief History,” which appeared in the Journal of American History and “Ottoman Orientalism” and “Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and Evangelical Modernity,” both of which appeared in the American Historical Review.
Makdisi has also published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and in the Middle East Report.
Makdisi and his brothers, Saree and Karim, are co-creators of the Makdisi Street podcast. Follow them on X: @MakdisiStreet or on YouTube: @MakdisiStreet.