A book to preorder —

As you can see, not all students liked the new lectures I wrote for my Modern Middle East survey. Some, in fact, were rather vocal about their dissatisfaction —

I vowed to protect my students from Hegel but caved in and showed them a YouTube lecture (from Marci Shore's Intellectual History Since Nietzsche class), and now they want more Hegel. I obviously did something wrong but I am afraid we're too deep in the mud to flee to safety.

One of the most tormenting tasks of academic life is writing the abstract for a finished papers. This last paragraph or two never comes out easily. The opposite of the beginning, when an implausibly ambitious and borderline delusional abstract flows right from my fingers.

With forthcoming pieces in Kritika and the Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient, I can at least say I did not completely abandon and still contributed a bit to the fields I was trained in before European history — Islamic and then imperial Russian history…

Very promising!

An interesting passage about the growth of synagogue attendance/affiliation among Jews in post-WWII America. (From Rachel Kranson's excellent Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America)

Bir Twitter takipçim Marci Shore'un Avrupa entelektüel tarihi dersinden Türkçe altyazılı bir videonun bağlantısını gönderdi. Bu dersin yeni kitlelere ulaştığını görmek için mutluyum: youtube.com/watch?v=H-rB-5…

The odds are slim, but let me try anyway: does anyone have Станка Пенчева's poetry collection Пълнолетие (1952) and would be willing to share the early poems (pages 7–18)? My book manuscritp thanks you in advance...

On the private lives of political activism/nationalism, from a book I will never stop teaching: Hudá Sha‘rāwī's memoir, translated into English as _Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist._

Faris al-Shidyaq knew in the 1850s what learners of Classical Arabic still find out every generation anew: there are few greater joys than opening Lisan al-Arab (or your favorite Arabic dictionary) on a random page. (Robyn Creswell, NYRB, 2015)

I *really* look forward to reading this book: "the generation gap, dysfunctional nuclear family, youth unrest, activism including feminist advocacy, counterculturalism, capitalist imperialism, race relations, socially conscious music, and hallucinogenic consciousness expansion"!

Everything you need to know to reject Scimago as a ranker of journals – although universities increasingly rely on it – is that the #2 journal in "Literature and Literary Theory" is "Criminology and Public Policy." When was the last time it published a literary scholar?

A marvelous book

A breathtaking quote from an article on a very good topic: Marc Schade-Poulsen, “The Left Wing Turn to Human Rights in Tunisia,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 56, no. 1 (2024): 18–37.

Both hilarious and on point

Excited to be invited to present at Uni Leipzig and ENS' 40th Transnational Seminar on Cultural Transfer. I'll ask, following up on a book chapter I published last year, what cultural transfer may efface and obfuscate and whether we can save what's lost. Abstract: