Ussama Makdisi
Dr. Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and Chancellor鈥檚 Chair at the University of California Berkeley.
He was previously Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational
Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston. During AY 2019-2020,
Professor Makdisi was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley
in the Department of History. In 2012-2013, Makdisi was an invited Resident Fellow
at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin). 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.
Professor Makdisi鈥檚 most recent book 鈥淎ge of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World鈥� was published in 2019 by the University of California Press. He is also the author of 鈥淔aith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001鈥� (Public Affairs, 2010). His previous books include 鈥淎rtillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East鈥� (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 鈥淭he Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon鈥� (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 鈥淎nti-Americanism in the Arab World: An Interpretation of Brief History鈥� which appeared in the Journal of American History and 鈥淥ttoman Orientalism鈥� and 鈥淩eclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and Evangelical Modernity鈥� both of which appeared in the American Historical Review. Professor Makdisi has also published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and in the Middle East Report.
Email: makdisi@rice.edu