This book was conceived at a workshop called “Russia and the Arab World: History, Literature, Arts” convened by Margaret Litvin at Boston University in February 2017. At the time this area of study was not well developed.
Eileen Kane, Masha Kirasirova, and Margaret Litvin
Eileen Kane is professor of history and director of the Global Islamic Studies program at Connecticut College, and the author of Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (2015). She is working on a book about Jewish and Muslim emigration from Russia to the Middle East from the 1840s to the 1940s.
Masha Kirasirova is assistant professor of History at New York University-Abu Dhabi. Her research approaches modern Middle Eastern history from a “Second World” perspective, focusing on exchanges between Soviet Eurasia and the Middle East. She has co-edited the Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (2018) and published articles in Kritika, Ab Imperio, Iranian Studies, and several edited volumes. Her book The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire is forthcoming from Oxford.
Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University and the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (2011). Her current book project “Another East: Arab Writers, Moscow Dreams” explores the literary legacies of Arab-Soviet educational ties. She won a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Award to translate The Russian Quarter (2018) by Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez; an excerpt appears in Russian-Arab Worlds.