Adey Almohsen

I study the history of critique, ideas, and print culture in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the late eighteenth century to the present. My research and teaching interests include: modern MENA history, politics, and cultures; intellectual and literary histories of the Arab world; histories of Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict; modernisms, nationalisms, and radicalisms in the Arab and Third worlds; intellectual histories of the long 19th and long 20th centuries; the Nahda and the history of critique in the Arab world; Arabic poetry; modern Islamic thought; histories of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, and Palestinian studies; and twentieth century Arab-American thought.

Building on my award-winning doctoral dissertation, I am wrapping up a book set to investigate the contested history of Palestinian thought—and its Arab discontents—in the aftermath of national ruin, and to examine the ideas of Palestinian writers dispersed across Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Gaza, Jerusalem, Khartoum, and Kuwait. In the Nakba’s Wake: An Intellectual History of Palestine is primed on the untranslated and little-studied expressions of Palestinian and Arab thought as they appeared in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, poetry volumes, correspondences, and various ephemera.

My research has consistently attracted funding from institutions in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Most recently, I was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for the completion of my book.