NEWTON

I wrote The Politics of Melodrama after realizing that Ihsan Abdel Kouddous’s wildly popular romantic serials operated on two levels. At first glance, they were cliff‑hangers that boosted the circulation of Rose El Youssef<..

As I note in the Preface of my book, Stuart Schaar suggested I write a book about Edward Said similar to the book he had written about our mutual friend, the late Eqbal Ahmad. After this, I experimented with the idea through talks delivered at various universit..

This book is my attempt to correct a grave injustice by zooming in on a free, spiritual, inventive Moroccan woman filmmaker. While little known outside Morocco, there she is a cultural icon and a revered dame du cinéma.

I first traveled to Egypt in 2007 for an Arabic-language program. During that initial trip, I became well-acquainted with a Coptic Orthodox Christian family in Cairo’s Masakin Sheraton neighborhood. I experienced Orthodox liturgy for the first time with them, a..

This book stems from a reaction to the pervasive and acritical use of civilizational paradigms in the study of modern Arabic literature.

Several years ago, I learned about a young Syrian man who was bayonetted at a labor strike. At the time, I was a new PhD student and a recent arrival to Boston, thirty miles from Lawrence, Massachusetts, where John Ramey was killed by a state militiaman in 1912..

This book is not so much edited as curated, by a team of Egyptian and international scholars, human rights defenders, and activists who came together in support of prisoners of conscience in Egypt.

I have been interested in ethnographies of labor since I became an anthropologist, and having decided to do my doctoral fieldwork in Israel, I settled on agriculture as the economic sector that is perhaps most closely implicated in the Zionist project.

The occult in the modern Arab world is an endlessly rich topic. It brings together questions of modernity, religion, science, performance, and identity in an unusual but compelling sub-culture, populated with some fascinating and eccentric—if not always endeari..