I am Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, and the author of Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton, 2008; revised and updated, with a new foreword by Alice Walker, 2010); Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Reading William Blake (Cambridge University Press, 2015). I am presently completing a book called Tolerance is a Wasteland.
I received my PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University in 1993, and my BA from Wesleyan University in 1987.
My teaching and research are situated at the crossroads of several different fields, including British Romanticism, imperial culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism, and the cultures of urban modernity, particularly the revision and contestation of charged urban spaces, including London, Beirut and Jerusalem. I have also written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world.
Saree Makdisi 