Gaza, History, and the Question of Genocide with guest speaker Dr. Ussama Makdisi

Dr. Ussama Makdisi is the inaugural May Ziadeh Chair in Palestinian and Arab Studies, Professor of History, and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California Berkeley. He was previously Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston. In 2012-2013, Makdisi was an invited Resident Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin). The Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a 2009 Carnegie Scholar as part of its effort to promote original scholarship regarding Muslim societies and communities, both in the United States and abroad. Makdisi was awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy of Berlin. Professor Makdisi’s most recent book Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World was published in 2019 by the University of California Press. He is also the author of Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs, 2010).  His previous books include Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), which was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. He is also the author of The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000). Ussama co-hosts the Makdisi Street podcast. He has consistently engaged in public-facing writing and advocacy. He has published in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Houston Chronicle, Middle East Eye, LA Review of Books, Jacobin, Sidecar, and Aeon as well as on various Arabic media. He has appeared on numerous television and radio shows including Al Jazeera, NPR, and TRT International, and on media sites such as The Dig, The Majority Report with Sam Seder and The Beinart Notebook.

Sponsored by the History Department, Critical Theory and Social Justice Department, and The Annenberg Fund.