Saree Makdisi is the Chair of the English Department at UCLA and a scholar of Palestine, colonial history, and its afterlives. He is the author of Palestine Inside Out (Norton, 2008), which counted Alice Walker, Desmond Tutu, and Howard Zinn among its many supporters, and Tolerance is a Wasteland (UCP, 2022), which Judith Butler called “a beacon of light.” He wrote the introduction for the recent reissue of Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine, which he presented at Southbank Center in a much-watched speech last fall. He writes frequently for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, n+1, and the London Review of Books. His essay “No Human Being Can Exist” was n+1’s most-read piece of 2023. Ussama Makdisi is the inaugural May Ziadeh Chair in Palestinian and Arab Studies, Professor of History, and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California Berkeley. His latest book, Age of Coexistence (University of California Press, 2019), was praised by Peter Beinart and Rashid Khalidi, among others. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Houston Chronicle, The Yale Review, Jewish Currents, and Aeon, as well as on various Arabic media, and he has appeared on numerous television and radio shows including Al Jazeera, TRT International, and NPR’s Morning Edition.
