Adey Almohsen

I study the history of intellectual networks, ideas, critique, and print culture in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the late eighteenth century to the present. My research and teaching interests include: modern MENA history, politics, and cultures; Palestinian and Arab intellectual and literary histories; Israel, Palestine, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; classical and modern Arabic poetry; cultures of nationalism and radicalism in the Arab and Third worlds; global intellectual histories of the 19th and 20th centuries; the Nahda and Arab critique; modern Islamic thought and political Islams; history of postcolonial studies between the US and MENA; and the history of Arab-American thinking and writing in the twentieth century.

Building on my award-winning doctoral dissertation, I am presently authoring a monograph, Minds in Exile: An Intellectual History of Palestinians 1945–70, set to investigate the contested, multivalent history of Palestinian thought (and its Arab discontents) in the wake of national ruin and to examine the ideas and lives of Palestinian writers dispersed across Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Gaza, Jerusalem, Khartoum, and Kuwait. In terms of sources, Minds in Exile is primed on the untranslated and fundamentally ignored expressions of Palestinian (and Arab) writing and thinking as they appeared in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, scrapbooks, poetry volumes, correspondences, and various ephemera. My research has consistently attracted funding from institutions and foundations in the Middle East, Europe, and the US. Most recently, I was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for the completion of my book project.