Adey Almohsen

I study intellectual networks, print culture, and the history of ideas in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the nineteenth century to the present. My research and teaching interests include: modern MENA history, politics, and cultures; Palestinian and Arab intellectual and literary histories; Israel/Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; classical and modern Arabic poetry; cultures of nationalism, Marxism, and radicalism in the Arab and Third worlds; global intellectual histories of the 19th and 20th centuries; the Nahda and Arab critique—left and right; modern Islamic philosophy, political Islam, and Jihadist thought; history of postcolonial studies between the US and MENA; and the history of Arab-American thinking and writing in the twentieth century.

Building on my award-winning doctoral dissertation, I am presently authoring a monograph, On Modernism's Edge: An Intellectual History of Palestinians 1945–70, set to retell the contested history of Palestinian thought and critique in the wake of national ruin and to examine the ideas and lives of Palestinian poets, journalists, editors, critics, and translators exiled across Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Khartoum, and Kuwait. To make sense of this little-studied period, my archival research has taken me to different MENA cities and sites of the Palestinian diaspora. There, I collected and studied newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, scrapbooks, posters, correspondences, and miscellaneous ephemera. I tried to weigh this paper trail against the recollections of surviving figures from the period, interviewing over a dozen Arab and Palestinian writers. My research has consistently attracted generous funding from institutions in the Middle East, Europe, and the US.