Saree Makdisi

Saree Makdisi (born 1964) is an American literary critic and professor specializing in British Romanticism. He is of Palestinian and Lebanese descent. He also writes on contemporary Arab politics and culture.

Life Makdisi was born in Washington, United States. His father, Samir Makdisi, is a Lebanese-Palestinian professor of economics at the American University of Beirut and his mother, Jean Said Makdisi, is a Palestinian independent scholar (formerly of Beirut University College). He is also the grandson of Anis K. Makdisi, a late professor of Arabic at American University of Beirut and the nephew of the late literary scholar Edward Said. In 2009, Makdisi gave the Edward Said Memorial lecture at the University of Adelaide.

He spent his early childhood in the United States, moving to Lebanon at the age of eight. While he grew up in a Christian family, they lived "in a largely Muslim neighborhood of Beirut."

On November 26, 2023, Makdisi with his two brothers, Karim and Ussama, began hosting a podcast entitled Makdisi Street

Books Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1998) William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2002) Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008) Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race & Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014) Reading William Blake (Cambridge University Press, 2015) Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022)

Awards 2009: Arab American Book Award honorable mention for Palestine Inside Out.