N3142 Humanities & Social Studies Center
1226 Park St.
51±¾É«, IA 50112
United States
Adey Almohsen
2024–5 ACLS Fellow
I study the history of intellectual networks, ideas, critique, 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; nationalisms, modernisms, and radicalisms in the Arab and Third worlds; transnational intellectual histories of the long 19th and long 20th centuries; the Nahda and Arab critique; classical and modern Arabic poetry; modern Islamic thought; history of postcolonial studies; and Arab-American thought in the twentieth century.
Building on my , I am presently authoring a monograph, Minds in Exile: An Intellectual History of Palestinians 1945–70, set to investigate the contested, multivalent history of Palestinian thought—and its Arab discontents—in the wake of national ruin and to examine the ideas and lives of Palestinian writers dispersed across Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Gaza, Jerusalem, Khartoum, and Kuwait. Minds in Exile is primed on the untranslated and woefully ignored expressions of Palestinian and Arab thought as they appeared in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, scrapbooks, poetry volumes, correspondences, and various ephemera. My research has consistently attracted funding from institutions and foundations in the Middle East, Europe, and the US. Most recently, I was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies () for the completion of my book project.
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," 4 (2024).
"A New Horizon in an Old City: Amin Shunnar, al-Ufuq al-Jadid Magazine, and the Intellectual History of 1960s Jerusalem," 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).