A talk by Saree Makdisi, followed by a discussion with light refreshments. Professor Makdisi’s most recent work addresses the cultural and political processes through which England turned itself into a recognizably Western country; Wednesday, he will offer a reading of the “civilization” of London through the nineteenth century.
Saree Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA; his work focuses on the culture of modernity and empire in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, extending to address the consequences and afterlives of modernity and empire in the contemporary Arab world. He is the author of Romantic Imperialism (1998), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003), and Palestine Inside Out (2010). He is also co-Editor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Arabian Nights in Historical Context (2008), and Marxism beyond Marxism (1996). His latest book, entitled Making England Western, is forthcoming from Chicago in 2013.
Professor Makdisi’s visit is sponsored by: the Departments of English, History, and Comparative Literature; the Reorientations Group, the Nineteenth-Century Forum, and the Eighteenth-Century Studies Group; and the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Islamic Studies Program, and the Center for Middle-Eastern and North African Studies.
