Saree Makdisi received his PhD from the Program in Literature at Duke University. His work explores the relationships, overlaps and tensions between modernity and empire in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and the afterlives of empire and the modernizing impulse in the contemporary Arab world, particularly Lebanon and Palestine.

 

He is 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, with a new foreword by Alice Walker, 2010).

 

His latest book, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2013. It explores the cultural and political processes through which England turned itself into a recognizably Western country in the nineteenth century, and includes chapters on Wordsworth, Austen, Byron, Southey, Macaulay, and Dickens as well a reading of the "civilization" of London through the nineteenth century

 

He is also completing work on the Cambridge Introduction to William Blake, which is due to be published by Cambridge University Press.

In addition to his own books, he is the co-editor of the volume The Arabian Nights in Historical Context (Oxford University Press, 2008), and of Marxism Beyond Marxism (Routledge, 1996), and he serves as co-Editor of the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature, which is published by the University of California Press.

In the spirit of speaking not only to a relatively narrow circle of scholars sharing a common expertise but to a broader public as well, he has written a number of articles on contemporary events which have appeared in, among other publications, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Nation, Salon, The London Review of Books, The Guardian and the Beirut newspaper al-akhbar.

 

His personal website is sareemakdisi.net

 

His recent academic publications include:

"'Mutual Interchange': Life, Liberty, Community," co-authored with Jon Mee, in Mark Crosby et al., eds., Re-Envisioning Blake (London: Palgrae Macmillan, 2012).

"Empire and Human Energy," in PMLA, vol. 126, no. 2 (March 2011).

"Introduction," special issue on Worldly Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature , vol. 65, no. 4 (March 2011).

"Riding the Whirlwind of Settler Colonialism," in Victorian Studies , vol. 53, no. 1 (Autumn 2010).

"The Architecture of Erasure," in Critical Inquiry , vol. 36, no. 3 (Spring 2010).

The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West, co-edited with Felicity Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

"Jane Austen, Empire and Moral Virtue," in Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman, eds., Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Approaches to British Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).

"Blake and the Ontology of Empire," in Jon Mee and Sarah Haggarty, eds., Blake and Conflict (London: Palgrave, 2008).

"British Literary Imperialism," in James Chandler, ed., The New Cambridge History of English Literature: The Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

"Edward Said and the Style of the Public Intellectual," in Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguli, eds., Edward Said: Debating the Legacy of a Public Intellectual (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2007).

"Immortal Joy: William Blake and the Cultural Politics of Empire," in David Worrall and Steve Clark, eds., Blake, Nation and Empire (London: Palgrave, 2006).

"Blake's Metropolitan Radicalism," in James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene in British Romanticism, 1780-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

"Beirut, a City Without History?" in Ussama Makdisi and Paul Silverstein, eds., Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

"Blake and the Communist Tradition," in Nicholas Williams, ed., Palgrave Advances in Blake Studies(London: Palgrave, 2005).