Aaron Rock-Singer

Aaron Rock-Singer is a social and intellectual historian of the Modern Middle East and Islam. He received his B.A from the University of Pennsylvania (2007), his M.Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford (2010) and his Ph.D from Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies (2016).  He is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Raoul Wallenberg Institute and teaches courses in both Middle East and Judaic Studies.

Dr. Rock-Singer's research draws on mass and small media to trace the changing relationship between religion, politics and society in the 20th-century Middle East.  His first book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and the Islamic Revival was published by Cambridge University Press (2019) and his second book, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th-Century Middle East, by the University of California Press (2022). Dr. Rock-Singer has also published ten articles in peer reviewed journals, including The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The Muslim World, and Islamic Law and Society, where he serves as a Book Review Editor and an Associate Editor. He is currently at work on a third monograph, tentatively entitled Worshipping the Nation:  Exclusivist Politics in Mandatory Palestine, 1927-48, which draws on Arabic and Hebrew-language sources to trace the linked emergence of Islamic and Jewish religio-political visions under the British Mandate.