Dr. Saree Makdisi

Biography

Saree Makdisi received his BA in English and Economics from Wesleyan University in 1987 and his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University in 1993. He is a Professor and Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His teaching and research are situated at the intersections of British Romanticism, imperial culture, and colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism. He has written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world and has contributed articles to various newspapers and magazines including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and the Guardian. His recent book, "Tolerance Wasteland: Palestine Culture Denial," was published by the University of California Press in 2022. Other notable works include "Reading William Blake" (Cambridge University Press, 2015), "Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, Imperial Culture" (University of Chicago Press, 2014), and "Palestine Everyday Occupation" (Norton, 2010). Currently, he is working on a new book project titled "London’s Modernities," which aims to map and unmap London from the nineteenth century to the present.

Research Interests