Middle
East Studies 2025 - 2026
ONGOINGRETURN
MappingMemoryandStorytellinginPalestine
Rana Barakat
Critical Indigeneities
In Palestine, a walk across the landscape is a journey of return that defies time, layered with sediments of personal experience and collective peoplehood. For Palestinian scholar Rana Barakat, the experience of place is guided by the stories and memories of her grandmother, who was among the 75 , people forcibly displaced in 948 by the newly formed Israeli government. Since then, the violence of settler colonialism has actively prevented the return of Palestinian refugees, including those from Lifta, her family's ancestral village. In the present, the settler state of Israel seems to control the fate of the remaining structures in Lifta, enforcing so-called development plans that limit access and leave the valley appearing frozen in time. By gathering stories from family and community members alongside archival sources and lived experience in the West Bank under Israeli occupation, however, Barakat reveals the way storytelling provides a form of ongoing return to a once-thriving village and to Palestine itself. One of the first books to position Palestinian studies within Indigenous studies, Barakat offers a rich perspective on Palestinian history and lives today. Embedded in a deeply personal journey, Ongoing Return takes the reader through the past via the present and dares to imagine futures for Palestine and its people.
03March2026|304pp|6halftones,notes,bibl.,index 9781469680309|
THEISRAELICAREEROFHUMMUS
Colonial
Appropriation, Authenticity,andDistinction
Dafna Hirsch
How did an Arab dish become an Israeli culinary passion? Less than a century ago, hummus and other Palestinian staples were often met with disinterest and sometimes outright rejection among Zionist settlers. Yet for modern-day Israelis, hummus has become a dish that is both everyday and iconic, intertwined with cultural perceptions of authenticity, indigeneity, and masculinity. The Israeli Career of Hummus tracks how hummus has turned from an "Arab" or "Oriental" food into a national symbol and culinary cult in Israel.
03March2026|308pp|29b&willus.
9780253075314|£31.00/$40.00|PB 9780253075307|£88.00/$110.00|HB
INDIANAUNIVERSITYPRESS
WHAT'SINANAME
StoriesbehindArabic-Palestinian Place-NamesinIsrael
Amer Dahamshe
Translated by Leigh Chipman
Olamot Series in Humanities and Social Sciences
Dahamshe analyzes the Arabic names of villages and towns as well as natural formations such as rivers, hills, and meadows in the Arab-Palestinian society in Israel. In doing so, Dahamshe provides different cultural explanations for the bestowal of these names, their origin as explained in the local stories of the Palestinian people, and their popular, communal, and autobiographical memories across generations. A poetic study of the ideological and cultural construction of how names create meaning.
03March2026|238pp|3charts
9780253075185|£22.99/$30.00|PB
9780253075178|£48.00/$60.00|HB
INDIANAUNIVERSITYPRESS
RESURGENCEANDREVOLUTION
ThePKKandtheKurdishFightinTurkeyandSyria
Aliza Marcus
A riveting current history of the Kurdish rebel PKK group Aliza Marcus' new book tells the remarkable story of Kurdish revolution in the Middle East led by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) – the rebel group whose insurgency in Turkey has impacted countries, conflicts, and Kurdish demands throughout the region. Combining reportage and scholarship, Resurgence and Revolution explores the PKK's resurgence from the brink of defeat after the capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999, and the brutal internal split that followed. The book tells the story of how Ocalan – operating from prison - reshaped the PKK to extend the group's influence beyond Turkey's borders, setting the stage for the group's dominance of northeastern Syria and the unlikely partnership between its allied forces and the U.S. in the fight against ISIS. Based on interviews with PKK fighters, their supporters, and opponents in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Europe, Marcus traces the group's ability to maintain power in Turkey and extend its activities across borders, using PKK rebels' own voices to show why young people join and fight for the group and its affiliates in Syria and Iran. For the more than 30 million Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria – and for the leaders of these countries - the PKK is a force that cannot be ignored. Understanding the PKK and what drives its supporters is crucial for understanding Kurdish demands and potential solutions. The fall of the Assad regime, and a new peace process between Turkey and the PKK has changed the dynamics for Kurdish demands and their control over territory in Syria.
May
BA'THISTIRAQTHROUGHARCHIVES
Reflections,Explorations,andOpportunities
Edited by Lisa Blaydes & Samuel Helfont
Stanford–Hoover Series on Authoritarianism
The opening of Iraq's Ba'th Party archives revolutionized the study of Iraqi politics and history, offering scholars unprecedented access to the inner workings of one of the world's most impenetrable autocracies. This volume brings together leading scholars to take stock of what we have learned from over a decade of research using the Ba'thist archives, contributing to a new understanding of Iraq's history, with wider implications for understanding authoritarianism.
16June2026|456pp|6illus.|6halftones
9781503645301|£48.00/$60.00|HB
STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
CIVILIZINGCONTENTION
InternationalAidinSyria'sWar
Rana B. Khoury
Khoury asserts that to understand civilian and refugee activism in war, we must regard the international actors and organizations that enter the scene to help. When these organizations respond to crises, they work with local actors. In so doing, they facilitate activists' participation in something like a civil society even in the depths of war. Yet as aid imposes its structures and routines, it also leaves activists unprotected from the violence of war and its aftermaths.
15November2025|210pp|1b&whalftone,4maps,7graphs
9781501784118|£23.99/$31.95|PB
9781501784101|£116.00/$145.00|HB
CORNELLUNIVERSITYPRESS
DRAWINGBOUNDARIES
Oil,Empire,andtheMakingoftheEmiratiState
Niklas A. Haller
Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East
The boundaries between the seven constituent emirates of the UAE form one of the most complex territorial landscapes in the Middle East that is marked simultaneously by striking fragmentation on the map and inconspicuousness on the ground. Haller traces how such boundaries were shaped, dismantled, disregarded, and reappeared throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
15December2025|336pp|17maps
9780815611912|£60.00/$74.95|HB
SYRACUSEUNIVERSITYPRESS
POLITICS
INAPPROPRIABLEFORCE
TheGeziProtestsandthePoliticsofRefusal
Nazlı Konya
In the aftermath of the global mass protests of the 2010s, democratic theorists have shown renewed interest in conceptualizing popular mobilization and "the people." A series of provocative works have theorized assembled crowds in the streets as sources of democratic authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty. These insightful accounts nevertheless often remain detached from the full range of the situated experiences of protesters.
05May2026|256pp
9781531514082|£22.99/$30.00|PB
9781531514075|£84.00/$105.00|HB
FORDHAMUNIVERSITYPRESS
IRAN'SLOOKEASTPOLICY
NewDirections
Edited by Mehran Kamrava
Iran's Look East Policy is the first systematic analysis of the causes, manifestations, and consequences of Iran's "Look East" policy and Iranian relations with countries as diverse as Russia, China, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, the Central Asian states, and the South Caucasus. Edited by Mehran Kamrava, the essays in the book are framed around several recent "Look East" developments.
15January2026|348pp|9charts
9781501784545|£31.00/$39.95|PB
9781501784538|£104.00/$130.00|HB
CORNELLUNIVERSITYPRESS
SHIFTINGSOLIDARITIES
TheSouthAfricanAnti-ApartheidMovement's PerceptionsofZionism
Asher Lubotzky
Reconsiderations in Southern African History
Scholars and activists have increasingly drawn on the language of apartheid to describe the sociopolitical situation in Israel and Palestine. In South Africa today, Israel is notorious for its collaboration with the former white minority regime. This prevailing association belies a complex relationship between radical South Africans and Israel from the 1940s to the 1960s.
16June2026|330pp
9780813955094|£29.99/$39.50|PB
9780813955087|£96.00/$120.00|HB
UNIVERSITYOFVIRGINIAPRESS
BELONGINGONBOTHSHORES
Mobility,Migration,andtheBordering ofthePersianGulf
Lindsey R. Stephenson
For most of their history, the people around the Persian Gulf littoral were socially intertwined and economically interdependent. But the twentieth century ushered in nationalization projects, British imperial intervention, and border regulations, all of which posed challenges to everyday mobility in this oceanic world. Those crossing the water became the primary foil for bordering spaces, restricting and regulating movement, and defining difference more generally.
13January2026|216pp|1table, 6halftones,9maps
9781503644250|£56.00/$70.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
POLITICALUNDESIRABLES
Citizenship,Denaturalization,and ReclamationinIraq
Zainab Saleh
Political Undesirables considers the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in Iraq, focusing on the mass denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews in 1950–51 and Iraqis of Iranian origin in the early 1980s. Since the formation of the modern state of Iraq under British rule in 1921, practices of denaturalization and expulsion of citizens have been mobilized by ruling elites to curb political opposition. Iraqi politicians, under both monarchical and republican rule, routinely employed the rhetoric of threats to national security, treason, and foreignness to uproot citizens they deemed politically undesirable.
09December2025|240pp
9781503644649|£20.99/$28.00|PB
9781503643833|£88.00/$110.00|HB
STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
MIGRATION, IMMIGRATION & EMIGRATION
PORTRAITSOFUNBELONGING
PhotographicJourneysAcrossBorders
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel
A profound examination of how photographs can both sever and connect, tracing the paths of Ottoman Armenians across state and family archives. In 1896 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree that allowed Armenians – and only Armenians – to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return to their homeland. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. The Ottoman state archived the photographs; the Armenian migrants received passports and left for European ports, most of them bound for the United States.
16June2026|408pp|14figures,115 halftones
9781503646698|£26.99/$35.00|PB 9781503646322|£112.00/$140.00|HB
STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
THEMIZRAHIERAOFREBELLION
Israel'sForgottenCivilRights Struggle,1948-1966
Bryan K. Roby
Contemporary Issues in the Middle East
During the postwar period of 1948–56, over 400,000 Jews from the Middle East and Asia immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. By the end of the 1950s, Mizrahim, also known as "Oriental Jewry," represented the ethnic majority of the Israeli Jewish population. Despite their large numbers, Mizrahim were considered outsiders because of their non-European origins. Viewed as foreigners who came from culturally backward and distant lands, they suffered decades of socioeconomic, political, and educational injustices.
01June2026|272pp|7b&willus. 9780815612155|£22.99/$29.95|PB
SYRACUSEUNIVERSITYPRESS
BOUNDARIESTHATDIVIDE
HowJournalistsinTurkeySurrenderedTheirPower OverPolitics
Defne Över
Turkey presents a striking example of the most recent wave of global authoritarian turns. The transition in the country’s political system also transformed its media environment. As mainstream journalists gradually yielded their places to sycophants, a new sphere of critical journalism emerged, with mainstream journalists joining their fellows in the peripheries.
14April2026|198pp|4colourimagesand4tables
9781978844179|£24.99/$32.95|PB
9781978844186|£96.00/$120.00|HB
RUTGERSUNIVERSITYPRESS
CINEMABEFORETHEWORLD
TheGlobalRoutesoftheLumièreBrothers
Michael Allan
Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema – and the world – can be. Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media.
03March2026|240pp|38b&willus.
9781531514044|£22.99/$30.00|PB
9781531514037|£84.00/$105.00|HB FORDHAMUNIVERSITYPRESS
GOVERNINGGENEALOGIESOFINTERNATIONAL FILMEDUCATION
Edited by Hadi Gharabaghi &Terri Ginsberg
A critical historiographic understanding of governmentalized film education during the Cold War. Chapters examine the production of hygiene and cultural films in Travancore, India during the postcolonial period, and Michigan State University’s documentary collaboration with Iran during the 1970s, among other topics, elucidating cinema’s deployment as a state apparatus and its implications for global cultures, subject positions, and social relations.
28August2026|324pp|31halftonesand15colourart
9781439924648|£35.00/$45.95|PB
9781439924631|£120.00/$149.50|HB
TEMPLEUNIVERSITYPRESS
ARTCAPITAL
MuseumPoliticsandtheMakingoftheLouvreAbuDhabi
Beth Derderian
Culture and Economic Life
Museums often served nationalist and imperialist interests in the past, but the primary force in the 21st century is the market. Museum franchising—exemplified by the Louvre Abu Dhabi—is one of the most visible cases of the increasing entanglement of art and museums with capital interests. Such projects are often touted as global enterprises diversifying the art world. Frequently, critics of these controversial projects question these claims and market influence. The intersection of these two forces—increasing capitalization and moving toward inclusivity— creates a fundamental tension, and that is the subject of Beth Derderian's Art Capital Focusing on the decade between the Louvre Abu Dhabi's announcement and its eventual opening, the book analyzes how major shifts away from the 19th- and 20th-century paradigm of culture-state representation play out in museums' and artists' everyday practices. Derderian traces the emergence of a new logic, wherein the ways that artists represent the state shift, as does the notion of what constitutes 'good art.' In addition, these intersecting forces spur preemptive erasures that neutralize and depoliticize difference for museum publics. Drawing on ethnographic research with artists, curators, museum staff, gallerists, art teachers, and other arts professionals, this book analyzes the UAE art world as a microcosm of these massive, epistemic changes.
13January2026|272pp|1table,37halftones
9781503644762|£22.99/$30.00|PB 9781503644182|£96.00/$120.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
DEADLYREFUSALS
KurdishDecolonizationinTimesofCounterterrorism
Serra M. Hakyemez
Set in the counterterrorism courts and maximum-security prisons of Northern Kurdistan, Serra M. Hakyemez's ethnography examines how prosecuted and imprisoned Kurds from different socioeconomic backgrounds organize in refusal of the criminalization and colonization of their political demands and desires. Through acts of self-criticism, revolutionary education, and comradely care, these prisoners articulate a political subjectivity that challenges the foundations of colonial power.
17March2026|312pp|8b&willus.
9781517920104|£22.99/$30.00|PB
9781517920098|£96.00/$120.00|HB
UNIVERSITYOFMINNESOTAPRESS
SHELTERFORTHENIGHT
OnAfghanistan,Language,andDetours
Fatima Mojaddedi
Shelter for the Night is an ethnographic meditation on language and psychic life in 2010s Afghanistan, where militarized violence has collapsed social worlds. Across Kabul and the countryside, in poetic and probing style, the book unpacks the precarious relationship between language, violence, and the self.
24March2026|270pp|1illus.
9781478038535|£23.99/$31.95|PB 9781478033622|£96.00/$119.95|HB
DUKEUNIVERSITYPRESS
SMUGGLINGLAW
UnsettledSovereigntiesinTurkey's KurdishBorderlands
Fırat Bozçalı
The Kurdish-populated Wan/Van Province is a major smuggling hub between Turkey and Iran. Kurdish smugglers cross this 180-mile-long land border, transporting everyday consumer goods—fuel, tobacco, sugar, and tea—as well as more illicit goods. As the Turkish state has enacted increasingly punitive anti-smuggling laws, smuggling has also become a site of contentious politics.
18November2025|272pp|4halftones,2maps
9781503644496|£22.99/$30.00|PB
9781503644113|£96.00/$120.00|HB
STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
PLANNINGTHEFUTUREOFABUDHABI
ACanadian-EmiratiCollaborationforSustainableUrbanism
Larry Beasley & Michael White
Early in the twenty-first century, Abu Dhabi was the quintessential boom town as the proceeds from vast oil production transformed its traditional landscape. But since 2007, the Emirate has become a showcase where explosive piecemeal expansion was superseded by visionary planning and development management – with a deliberate focus on sustainability, livability, and cultural sensitivity. Planning the Future of Abu Dhabi explains this dramatic transformation. Working with Abu Dhabi colleagues, Canadians led the founding of a progressive planning agency. Their rapid and comprehensive process resulted in state-ofthe-art guidance for development, including thorough urban and regional plans, a development control system, transportation innovations, environmental stewardship, and training for handover to local management. Larry Beasley, the overall project leader, and Michael White, the key in-country lead, bring together the Canadians to tell the story of how the Emirate was repositioned as a model in the Middle East for advanced, responsible growth.
ARCHITECTURE
ARCHITECTUREANDTHERIGHT TOHEAL
ResettlerNationalismintheAftermath ofConflictandDisaster
Esra Akcan
In Architecture and the Right to Heal, Esra Akcan calls for architecture to take an active role in healing communities affected by socioeconomic, political, and environmental disasters. Akcan frames these processes by discussing buildings and spaces in relation to climate change mitigation and transitional justice. Focusing on lands held by the former Ottoman Empire, Akcan highlights the ongoing struggle to heal after internal social, state, and business-led violence ranging from enforced disappearance to mass extinction.
11November2025|456pp|149colour images,1map 9781478032571|£31.00/$40.00|PB 9781478029243|£116.00/$145.00|HB DUKEUNIVERSITYPRESS
SHOWPIECECITY
HowArchitectureMadeDubai
Todd Reisz
Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
Staggering skylines and boastful architecture make Dubai famous—this book traces them back to a twentieth-century plan for survival. Showpiece City recounts the story of how Harris and other hired professionals planned Dubai's spectacular transformation through the 1970s. Drawing on exclusive interviews, private archives, dog-eared photographs, and previously overlooked government documents, Todd Reisz reveals the braggadocio and persistence that sold Dubai as a profitable business plan. Architecture made that plan something to behold. Reisz highlights initial architectural achievements—including the city's first hospital, national bank, and skyscraper—designed as showpieces to proclaim Dubai's place on the world stage. 27October2020|416pp| 125halftones 9781503609884|£24.99/$32.00|HB
POETICALITY
InRefusalofSettlerLife
Jeffrey Sacks
"Willyounotmemorizealittlepoetrytohalttheslaughter?"thePalestinianpoetMahmoud Darwishwrote.Darwish’spoeticstatementpointstoworld-evacuatingandgenocidalviolences ashislanguagerecallsustoasonorityinutteranceandactsofrefusalincollectiveform. ThroughreadingsofArabicandArabpoetry,art,translation,andphilosophy,JeffreySacks illuminesanindetermined,non-accumulative,non-propertiedmanneroflingualdoing–across post-Ottomantopographiesandstates,andinexcessofanysinglelanguage–where languageisapracticeinsociality,thesocialisindistinctfromtheontological,andbeingisa poeticmode–whatthisbookcalls"poeticality."PoeticalitystudiestheLebanese-Americanpoet andpainterEtelAdnan,theIraqipoetandtranslatorKhālidal-Maʿālī,philosophersintheArabic peripatetictradition,andwritingsofKarlMarx,PaulCelan,WalterBenjamin,andothers,to demonstrateasenseofformwhollyotherthanwhatisadvancedinself-determinedsocial existence,linguisticself-understanding,andphilosophicalself-representation–amannerof addressandasocialpose,whichSackssummarizesundertheheading"settlerlife."Settlerlife–aformoflife,apracticeofreading,andanasymmetricdistributionofsocialdestruction–assertsitselfasageneralizedandregulatingattackuponBlackandIndigenouslife,andupon allformsofnonwhite,non-Christian,non-heteronormativeexistence."Everythingisinthe languageweuse,"theOglalaLakotapoetLayliLongSoldierhaswritten.Thisbook–learning fromLongSoldier’sobservationandwithDarwish’ssenseofthepoetic–affirmsthedemandfor Indigenoussovereignty,inPalestine,inTurtleIsland,andelsewhere. 23January2026|336pp|16colourand3b&willus. 9781531512330|£26.99/$35.00|PB FORDHAMUNIVERSITYPRESS
POETRY
ISISENOUGH
Poems
Lauren Camp
21st Century Poets
Is Is Enough begins in heritage and harmony then breaks apart into the strange world and tautly stretched emotions that accompany dementia. The collection flickers through and locates in distorted realities, loss, and gentling. By haunting the past, the author reweaves and reorients against a continual vanishing. Ordinary situations begin to seem like joy in reverse, a treatise on the honesty of the present.
15February2026|86pp
9781680034523|£16.99/$21.95|PB
TRP:THEUNIVERSITYPRESSOFSHSU
MUSICOFTHEWIDELANE
Sharon Hass
Translated by Marcela Sulak
Shirá Series in Contemporary Hebrew Poetry in Translation
Music of the Wide Lane explores homoerotic relationships, tense mother–daughter bonds, and the concept of light as a metaphor for truth and goodness. This remarkable fifth collection of Hass’s work includes an extended elegy for a dying father, two major poems from her previous work, and invites readers to expand their understanding of and appreciation for Hebrew-language poetry.
17March2026|110pp
9781477333259|£13.99/$18.00|PB
UNIVERSITYOFTEXASPRESS
TRACINGTHEETHER
ContemporaryPoetryfromSaudiArabia
Edited by Moneera Al-Ghadeer
Middle East Literature in Translation
An expansive bilingual anthology, Tracing the Ether showcases twenty-six acclaimed Saudi poets who are reimagining their place in our interconnected, digital world. Breaking away from the traditional focus on pre-Islamic Arabian poetry, this collection presents sixty-two contemporary poems that engage boldly with modernity, cyberspace, and globalization.
17November2025|224pp
9780815611967|£15.99/$29.95|HB
SYRACUSEUNIVERSITYPRESS
THECOMMITTEE
ANovel
Sonallah Ibrahim
Middle East Literature in Translation
Ibrahim offers an unbroken first-person narrative rendered in brief, crisp prose framed by a conspicuous absence of vivid imagery. Furthermore, the petitioner is a man without identity. The ideal antihero, he remains, as does his country, unnamed throughout the intricate plot with a locale suggestive of 1970s Cairo.
01May2026|176pp
9780815612179|£13.99/$17.95|PB
9780815607267|£17.99/$22.95|HB
SYRACUSEUNIVERSITYPRESS
THECOUNTRYDOCTOR'STALE
Mohamed Mansi Qandil
Middle East Literature in Translation
Qandil’s novel evokes the beauties and cruelties of life in a small community on the edge of the Nile, as our doctor’s journey takes him through the muddy lanes of the village, the verdant fields of maize, and finally a grim quest in the haunting landscape of the White Desert—all the while struggling with an imperfect moral compass.
07April2026|220pp
9780815612025|£26.99/$34.95|PB
SYRACUSEUNIVERSITYPRESS
FICTION
THERAVENOFRUWIANDOTHER STORIESFROMOMAN
Hamoud Saud
Translated from the Arabic by Zia Ahmed
Middle East Literature in Translation
In this lyrical collection, Omani author Hamoud Saud invites readers into the soul of Muscat, the capital city of Oman, a country famed for its long coastline, rugged mountains, and stark desert landscapes. This geography provides the backdrop for stories that reveal both the beauty and hardship of a country and people on the margins.
18March2026|150pp
9780815612018|£22.99/$29.95|PB
SYRACUSEUNIVERSITYPRESS
THEVIRGINOFSOLITUDE ANovel
Taghi Modarressi
Translated by Nasrin Rahimieh
Middle East Literature In Translation
On the streets of Tehran, Nuri Hushiar knows his blond hair and blue eyes attract attention. While he relishes the attention he cannot avoid the uneasy feeling of being out of place. This sense of being exceptional and estranged is the hallmark of his character and the focus of his struggle in Taghi Modarressi's last stunning novel. Nasrin Rahimieh's translation captures the tone and mood of the original, rendering both Modarressi's subtle humor and assured prose with effortless precision.
01June2026|398pp
9780815612148|£14.99/$19.95|PB
SYRACUSEUNIVERSITYPRESS
STANFORD STUDIES IN MIDDLE EASTERN, ISLAMIC SOCIETIES & CULTURES
THESTATEOFLEBANON
PopularPoliticsandInstitutionBuildingintheWakeofIndependence
Ziad Abu-Rish
Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
Lebanon gained its formal political independence in 1943. During the dozen years that followed, women and men across class, sectarian, geographic, and ideological divides built, challenged, and reformed the institutional arrangements that would shape the country. With this book, Ziad Abu-Rish traces shifting patterns of alliances and conflict that shaped the material and representational production of the Lebanese nation-state. Exploring labor regimes, women's suffrage, the provision of electricity in Beirut, public education, and the armed forces—and the meetings, lectures, pamphlets, delegations, and protests they produced—Abu-Rish demonstrates how elite and popular groups mobilized normative ideas about independence and state power. The State of Lebanon offers a new social and institutional history of post-colonial Lebanon. Abu-Rish challenges common narratives of an absent, weak, or failed state. Instead, state institutional arrangements emerge as objects and subjects of political mobilization by politicians, bureaucrats, party activists, students, and workers. Rather than read history backward from the present, he approaches the past on its own terms. In so doing, Abu-Rish offers significant insights into politics, social life, and the state in Lebanon—grounded in the early post-independence period yet critical to how we understand Lebanon today.
17March2026|352pp
9781503645820|£23.99/$32.00|PB 9781503645295|£104.00/$130.00|HB
STANFORD STUDIES IN MIDDLE
EASTERN, ISLAMIC SOCIETIES & CULTURES
COLORBLIND
RacialThinkingandCultural ProductioninModernIran andtheDiaspora
Amy Motlagh
Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
With this book, Amy Motlagh considers how racial thinking underpins cultural practices in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Despite cultural traditions depicting black people and the documented presence of black Iranians, many have insisted that race is not an important aspect of Iranian culture, that "blackness" does not exist in Iran. Instead, it is the notion of being "Persian" that binds all Iranians together. But, as Motlagh argues, the word "Persian" masks a long racial history that depends on the specter of blackness to define what is truly Iranian.
24March2026|248pp
9781503646063|£20.99/$28.00|PB 9781503636484|£88.00/$110.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
PLOTSANDDEEDS
AgrarianAnnihilationandtheFightfor LandJusticeinPalestine
Paul Kohlbry
Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice.
19December2025|256pp
9781503645110|£20.99/$28.00|PB
9781503645103|£88.00/$110.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
DICTATORSANDTHEHIGHER EDUCATIONDILEMMA
StatePowerandtheUniversityin ModernIran
Saeid Golkar
Dictators and the Higher Education Dilemma explores a powerful contradiction at the heart of modern authoritarian regimes: while universities are essential for producing skilled labor and projecting national progress, they also cultivate critical thinkers who can challenge state power. Drawing on Iran's modern history, from the Pahlavi monarchy to the Islamic Republic, Saeid Golkar shows how dictators use universities not only to train technocrats and showcase development but also as tools for shaping ideology, suppressing dissent, and co-opting academics.
09June2026|222pp
9781978842670|£24.99/$32.95|PB 9781978842687|£96.00/$120.00|HB
RUTGERSUNIVERSITYPRESS
EMBODYINGTHEREVOLUTION
TheHebrewExperienceandthe GlobalizationofModernSportsin InterwarPalestine
Ofer Idels
Addressing themes such as the body, language, space, immigration, internationalism, amateurism, gender, and militarization, Embodying the Revolution presents an innovative reading of Jewish life in Mandate Palestine, linking the marginalization of sports to the meaning and experience of the Zionist Revolution. Idels' compelling interpretation of the appeal of sports, selfhood, and the compromises inherent in radical aspirations—narrated from the periphery of the interwar global rise of sports—challenges contemporary assumptions that dismiss ideology as an elitist myth.
15December2025|168pp
9781978844469|£96.00/$120.00|HB
RUTGERSUNIVERSITYPRESS
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
DISABLINGRELATIONS
WoundedBodymindsand TransnationalPraxis
Sona Kazemi
D/C: Dis/color
Disabling Relations explains how disabled bodyminds are produced and sustained through the violence of patriarchal, capitalist-imperialist, nationalist, and theocratic social relations. Kazemi uses the theoretical concept of “wounding” as a historical process of becoming and remaining disabled mediated by unequal power relations and “disability consciousness” to show how these survivors come to terms with their disability. Thinking about critical disability theory in a new way, Kazemi investigates how disability is produced transnationally and the impact that this new theorization can make globally.
19December2025|264pp 9781439922491|£28.99/$37.95|PB 9781439922484|£96.00/$119.50|HB
TEMPLEUNIVERSITYPRESS
ARABAMERICANPUBLICHISTORY
Edited by Edward E. Curtis IV
History and the Public
How have public history projects celebrated Arab American life and culture and countered anti-Arab bias and discrimination? The editor and contributors to Arab American Public History show how this vibrant community creates their own narratives through writing, blogging, curating, collaborating, and broadcasting. They also consider how the larger social and political contexts affect their work and offer self-reflection. Arab American Public History is an invitation to engage more deeply with Arab American communities.
06February2026|244pp|7halftones 9781439927229|£26.99/$34.95|PB 9781439927212|£88.00/$110.50|HB
TEMPLEUNIVERSITYPRESS
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
ACCELERANT
Energy
Infrastructuresand theNaturalWorldin MakingModernIran
CiruceMovahedi-Lankarani
Between the late 1940s and the end of the twentieth century, natural gas became Iran's bedrock energy source. Billed as a futuristic fuel for a future world power, gas became an avenue for the country's developmentalist ambitions. The ability to build technologically sophisticated infrastructures served as a powerful tool of state legitimation, both before and after the 1979 Revolution, and tied top-down politics of modernization to bottom-up feelings of national belonging.
07April2026|320pp|1table,5halftones, 1map
9781503646223|£23.99/$32.00|PB
9781503643871|£104.00/$130.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
ENDURING HOSTILITY
TheMakingof America'sIranPolicy
Dalia Dassa Kaye
American policy toward Iran has remained remarkably consistent since the earliest years of the Reagan administration. US–Iran hostility has endured for longer than the Cold War. Momentous geopolitical shifts, changing leaderships, and evolving domestic priorities have not fundamentally altered this antagonistic relationship. Standard explanations pin the blame for this enduring hostility on Iran and its leaders' revolutionary ideology and policies at odds with the United States and the West.
02December2025|224pp
9781503644595|£18.99/$25.00|PB 9781503643901|£80.00/$100.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
COMRADES ESTRANGED
LaborandCitizenship intheTwentiethCenturyPersianGulf Alex Boodrookas
How workers and their allies shaped the worldhistoric transformations witnessed across the region: the consolidation of British sovereignty, formation of autocratic states, inrush of hydrocarbon wealth, onset of decolonization, and rise of both mass migration and mass politics. But unions failed to incorporate noncitizens into their movement, and as Boodrookas argues, this fatally undermined the movements' strength.
21April2026|368pp
9781503646476|£26.99/$35.00|PB
9781503645653|£112.00/$140.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS NEEDSTHATBIND
Materializing
NationalityinPostOttomanRegimes
Orçun Can Okan Needs that Bind reconsiders the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the construction of new regimes in the decade after World War I, to understand the consequential connections that remained among the new republican regime in Turkey and neighboring French and British Mandates in Syria-Lebanon and Iraq. Orçun Can Okan examines how these new states and their people managed problems of state succession through diplomatic, administrative, and legal interactions with and between bureaucracies.
14April2026|272pp|13halftones,1map
9781503645424|£56.00/$70.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
PURISTPURSUITS
Language,Global Ideas,andthe CreationofWestern Armenianinthe OttomanEmpire
Jennifer Manoukian
Purist Pursuitschronicles howandwhyArmenians intheOttomanEmpire fashionedanew languagecalledWesternArmenian.Tracingits risefromtheeighteenthtotheearly-twentieth centuries,JenniferManoukianstudiesthe evolutionofanever-changingideologythat undergirdedallphasesofthelanguage's formation:linguisticpurism.Constitutingthe primarypreoccupationoftheOttoman Armenianintelligentsia,linguisticpurism dictatedthatArmeniansneededtoabandon Turkishloanwordsandfundamentallyalterthe waytheywroteandspoke.
23June2026|336pp|7halftones,1map
9781503645677|£60.00/$75.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
TRANSLATE ANDRULE
Justice,Arabic Literature,andthe ColonialArchive
Hannah Scott Deuchar
Over the decades of the nineteenth century, Egypt changed dramatically, from a minor Ottoman province to a major player in global markets and a de facto British colonial territory. Integral to this transformation was legal reform: the Islamic system was replaced by laws adapted from the French Napoleonic code, edited by international committees, rendered in several languages, and applied in multilingual secular courts. Translation made law possible for Egyptians navigating international commerce and imperial rule.
30June2026|304pp
9781503647008|£23.99/$32.00|PB 9781503645431|£104.00/$130.00|HB
UNIVERSITYPRESS
THEAFTERLIFEOF OTTOMANEUROPE
MuslimsinHabsburg
BosniaHerzegovina Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe
The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe examines how Bosnian Muslims navigated the Ottoman and Habsburg domains following the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia Herzegovina after the 1878 Berlin Congress. Prominent members of the Ottoman imperial polity, Bosnian Muslims became minority subjects of AustriaHungary, developing a relationship with the new authorities in Vienna while transforming their interactions with Istanbul and the rest of the Muslim world.
03March2026|332pp|10halftones,2maps
9781503645899|£26.99/$35.00|PB
STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
TWORIVERS ENTANGLED
AnEcologicalHistory oftheTigrisand Euphratesinthe TwentiethCentury
Dale J. Stahl
During the 20th century, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers underwent a profound physical transformation, one that mirrored the region's political shift from imperial rule to nation-state. Here, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey took shape in the wake of the Ottoman Empire, and the two rivers became sites of economic development planning and largescale environmental engineering.
06January2026|264pp|12halftones, 3maps
9781503644731|£22.99/$30.00|PB
9781503640177|£96.00/$120.00|HB STANFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
ACTINGEGYPTIAN
Theater,Identity,and PoliticalCulturein Cairo,1869–1930
Carmen M. K. Gitre
Putting the spotlight on theatrical performance and cultural identity in Cairo at the turn of the last century, a historian reveals new aspects of the transition from the Ottoman to the British regimes on Egypt's path to self-rule. Drawing on scripts, playbills, ads, and numerous other sources, the book brings to life provocative debates that fostered a new image of national culture and performances that echoed the events of urban life in the struggle for independence.
04November2025|192pp|5b&wphotos, 1map
9781477333600|£31.00/$39.95|PB
UNIVERSITYOFTEXASPRESS
THEEGYPTIAN LABORCORPS
Race,Space,and PlaceintheFirst WorldWar
Kyle J. Anderson
This history sheds new light on Egypt's involvement in World War I by telling the story of the Egyptian Labor Corps and how the treatment of these primarily rural workers influenced the 1919 Egyptian Revolution. Documenting the history of the ELC and its work during the First World War, The Egyptian Labor Corps also provides a fascinating reinterpretation of the 1919 revolution through the lens of critical race theory.
04November2025|288pp|10b&wphotos
9781477333624|£31.00/$39.95|PB
UNIVERSITYOFTEXASPRESS
MEMOIRSOF APALESTINIAN COMMUNIST
TheSecretLifeof NajitiSidqi
Najati Sidqi
In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist brings to light the incredible life and work of Sidqi. The memoir describes his international travels, his work as an activist, and his political dealings. Translated from Arabic for the first time, it is a riveting firsthand account of an oftenoverlooked aspect of the history of the global left.
04November2025|164pp
9781477333228|£16.99/$21.95|PB
UNIVERSITYOFTEXASPRESS
THEOTTOMAN WORLDOFSPORTS
RefashioningBodies, Men,and CommunitiesinLate ImperialIstanbul
Murat C. Yildiz
Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, historian Murat Yıldız shows that sportsmen created new communal boundaries in team affiliations, fandom, and sports media. Adeptly reconstructing Istanbul’s imperial culture as it was experienced more than a century ago, The Ottoman World of Sports recovers a lived imperial culture whose defining features were shaped by its multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual sportsmen.
17February2026|344pp|58b&wphotos
9781477332863|£44.00/$55.00|HB
UNIVERSITYOFTEXASPRESS
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