"Between Islamophobia and Homophobia: Gender, Sexuality, and Liberal Engagements with Islam"

Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

More details to come.

Organized by Aria Daniel Nakissa, assistant professor of Islamic studies, Jewish Islamic & Near Eastern Languages & Cultures Program: arianakissa@wustl.edu


Joseph Massad teaches and writes about modern Arab politics and intellectual history. He has a particular interest in theories of identity and culture – including theories of nationalism, sexuality, race and religion. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1998. He is the author ofDesiring Arabs (2007), which was awarded the Lionel Trilling Book Award;The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinian Question (2006); and Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (2001).  His book Daymumat al-Mas’alah al-Filastiniyyahwas published by Dar Al-Adab in 2009, and La persistance de la question palestinienne was published by La Fabrique in 2009. The Arabic translation of Desiring Arabs was published in 2013 by Dar Al-Shuruq Press in Cairo under the title Ishtiha’ Al-‘Arab.

His latest book is Islam in Liberalism, University of Chicago Press, 2015, and his latest articles are “The Cultural Work of Recovering Palestine,”Boundary 2, Volume 42, No. 4, November 2015, 187-219, “El Trabajo cultural de recuperar la Palestina,” in En-claves, Mexico, Fall 2015, “Recognizing Palestine, BDS, and the Survival of Israel,” in Ashley Dawson and Bill Mullen, eds., Academic Freedom and BDS, Haymarket Books, 2015, “Egypt’s Propaganda and the Gaza Massacre,” in Laila El-Haddad and Refaat Alareer, eds., Unsilenced: Reflections and Responses to Israel's 2014 Attacks, Just World Books, 2015, “Orientalism as Occidentalism,” History of the Present, Winter 2015, “Olvidar el Semitismo,” Revista Foro Internacional, Mexico, July-September 2014, Vol. LIV, No. 3, 696-737, “Love, Fear, and the Arab Spring,” Public Culture, Winter 2014, 129-154, and “Forget Semitism!,” in Elisabeth Weber, editor,Living TogetherJacques Derrida's Communities of Peace and Violence, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 59-79.

His articles have appeared in many journals, including Public Culture, Interventions, Social Text, Middle East Journal, Psychoanalysis and History, Critique, Umbr(a), and the Journal of Palestine Studies, and he writes frequently for Al-Ahram WeeklyAl-Akhbar, and Al-Jazeera English. He teaches courses on modern Arab culture, psychoanalysis in relation to civilization and identity, gender and sexuality in the Arab world, and Palestinian-Israeli politics and society, with seminars on Nationalism in the Middle East as Idea and Practice, and also on Orientalism and Islam.