Middle East Studies

Sherene Seikaly

Sherene Seikaly is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a historian of capitalism, consumption, and development in the modern Middle East, focusing on how individuals, groups, and governments deploy both concepts and material practices to shape economy, the body, the self, and the other. Her book, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016), explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used the economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. Her second book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine, focuses on a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, an enslaver, and a refugee. His trajectory from nineteenth-century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth-century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. Dr. Seikaly is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Academic Senate, the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Harold J. Plous Award at UCSB; and the UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship. She currently serves as co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.