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We know that the delineation of the geographic space that we refer to today as the Middle East was the product of late nineteenth-century imperial anxieties and projects, reinforced in the second half of the twentieth century by the way in which US area studies (inflected by Cold War concerns) divided up the world and shaped knowledge production. In recent decades scholars have challenged this legacy, among other things by exploring interconnections that call into question conventional boundaries, by foregrounding questions of scale and by critically examining the utility of “the global” for understanding this region. What have these efforts yielded and where might they be taking us? 

Zachary Lockman is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and History at NYU. His research and teaching focus on the socioeconomic, cultural and political history of the modern Middle East, particularly the Mashriq. His publications include Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2016); Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge University Press, 2004; second edition, 2010); Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (University of California Press, 1996); and Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies (State University of New York Press, 1993). He has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association and as a member of its Committee on Academic Freedom; as a member of the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies; and as an editor (and currently a contributing editor) of Middle East Report. 

Sponsored by: Harrison Ruffin Tyler Department of History