Saree Makdisi - Romanticism and Primitive Accumulation

Inaugural Lecture in the Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism

Romanticism and Primitive Accumulation

Dr. Saree Makdisi is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of four monographs on Romantic literature: Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge UP, 1998), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago, 2003), Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago, 2014), and Reading William Blake (Cambridge UP, 2015). In addition, Dr. Makdisi is the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2008), and Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022).

He has also written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world, and, in addition to his scholarly articles, has also contributed pieces on current events to a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the London Review of Books.