Ussama Makdisi

Ussama Makdisi is a Palestinian American historian, specializing in the history of the modern Middle East. He is a professor of history and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley.

Makdisi's research focuses on the cultural and political history of the Middle East, with emphasis on identity, sectarianism, nationalism, and modernity.

In 2018, he was awarded the Berlin Prize.

Makdisi is part of a notable academic family — his uncle is the renowned literary theorist Edward Said, and his mother is Jean Said Makdisi.

Early Life

Ussama Makdisi was born in 1968 in Washington, D.C.. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University and later earned his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University.

Academic career

Makdisi held the 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.

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)