Adey Almohsen

I study the history of intellectual networks, ideas, critique, 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; nationalisms, modernisms, and radicalisms in the Arab and Third worlds; transnational intellectual histories of the long 19th and long 20th centuries; the Nahda and Arab critique; classical and modern Arabic poetry; modern Islamic thought; history of postcolonial studies; and Arab-American thought in the twentieth century.

Building on my award-winning doctoral dissertation, I am presently authoring a monograph, Minds in Exile: An Intellectual History of Palestinians 1945–70, set to investigate the contested, multivalent history of Palestinian thought—and its Arab discontents—in the wake of national ruin and to examine the ideas and lives of Palestinian writers dispersed across Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Gaza, Jerusalem, Khartoum, and Kuwait. Minds in Exile is primed on the untranslated and woefully ignored expressions of Palestinian and Arab thought as they appeared in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, scrapbooks, poetry volumes, correspondences, and various ephemera. My research has consistently attracted funding from institutions and foundations in the Middle East, Europe, and the US. Most recently, I was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for the completion of my book project.