Adey Almohsen

I study intellectual networks, print culture, critical thought, and the social and material history of ideas in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the early nineteenth century to the present. My research and teaching interests include: modern MENA history, politics, and cultures; Israel/Palestine; 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; modern and contemporary Arab thought—left and right; political Islam; history of postcolonialism between the US and MENA; and Arab-American history and letters.

At the moment, I am working on a monograph which expands and develops my award-winning PhD dissertation—On Modernism's Edge: An Intellectual History of Palestinians After 1948—on post-WWII Palestinian thinking (and its Arab discontents) and the intellectual history of the Arab world between the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1948-9 and of 1967. To uncover this little-studied historical period, my archival research has taken me to Amman, Beirut, and other sites of the Palestinian diaspora for two full years. There, I collected and examined Arabic-language newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, scrapbooks, posters, correspondences, and miscellaneous ephemera. I tried to weigh this paper trail against the recollections of surviving Palestinian and Arab intellectuals from the period, interviewing over a dozen novelists, artists, and critics in Amman and Beirut. My research has consistently attracted generous funding from institutions and foundations in the Middle East, Europe, and the US.