Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present

Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Toronto and has held visiting professorships at the universities of Marburg and Göttingen. His book publications include Fin de Siècle Beirut (2005), and his translation of Nafir Suriyya (with Hicham Safieddine) is forthcoming. He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History with Amal Ghazal. His present Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) research project, which focuses on the intersections between German, Jewish and Arab intellectual histories, has yielded two articles, 'Kafka and Arabs' (Critical Inquiry, 2012), and 'Translating Revolution: Hannah Arendt and Arab Political Culture'.

Max Weiss is Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, New Jersey. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (2010), co-editor (with Jens Hanssen) of Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge, 2016), and translator, most recently, of Nihad Sirees, States of Passion (2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History from Stanford University, held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Harvard Society of Fellows, and his research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, and the Carnegie Corporation. Currently, he is writing about the intellectual and cultural history of modern Syria, and translating several works of modern and contemporary Arabic literature.