
N3142 Humanities & Social Studies Center
1226 Park St.
51²è¹Ýapp, IA 50112
United States
Adey Almohsen
2025 ACLS Fellow
I study the history of critique, ideas, and print culture in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the late eighteenth century to the present. My research and teaching interests include: modern MENA history, politics, and cultures; intellectual and literary histories of the Arab world; histories of Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict; modernisms, nationalisms, and radicalisms in the Arab and Third worlds; intellectual histories of the long 19th and long 20th centuries; the Nahda and the history of critique in the Arab world; Arabic poetry; modern Islamic thought; histories of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, and Palestinian studies; and twentieth century Arab-American thought.
Building on my , I am wrapping up a book (In the Nakba's Wake: An Intellectual History of Palestine 1948–70) set to investigate the contested history of Palestinian thought—and its Arab discontents—in the aftermath of national ruin, and to examine the ideas of Palestinian writers dispersed across Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Gaza, Jerusalem, Khartoum, and Kuwait. In the Nakba's Wake is primed on the untranslated and little-studied expressions of Palestinian and Arab thought as they appeared in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, poetry volumes, correspondences, and various ephemera.
My research has consistently attracted funding from institutions in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Most recently, I was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies () for the completion of my book.
Education and Degrees
PhD; MA: History (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
BA with High Honors: Religion & Political Science (Carleton University, Canada)
Coursework in Engineering (Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan)
Selected Publications
"Laâbi, Kanafani, and the Ends of Theory: The Struggle Over National Literature in 1960s Morocco and Palestine," , no. 3 (2024).
Almohsen & Parr, "What Is Nakba Literature? Selections from al-Ufuq al-Jadid Magazine (1965)," 55 (2024): 155–67.
"A New Horizon in an Old City: Amin Shunnar, al-Ufuq al-Jadid Magazine, and the Intellectual History of 1960s Jerusalem," , no. 91 (2022): 140-159.
"Arab Critical Culture and Its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War," 29 (2021): 56–83.
In the News
Almohsen, Di-Capua, and O'Connell, "," interviewed by Rebecca McInroy, KUT: Austin's NPR Station (Sep. 2021).