Associate Professor of History
Email: maxweiss@princeton.edu
Max Weiss studies the cultural, intellectual, and literary history of the modern Middle East, and is Associated Faculty in Comparative Literature.
He is the author of Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Baʿthist Syria (Stanford UP, 2022), and In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shiʿism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Harvard UP, 2010); co-editor (with Jens Hanssen) of Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge UP, 2016), and Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present (Cambridge UP, 2018); and translator, most recently, of Alawiya Sobh, This Thing Called Love (Calcutta, 2022); Dunya Mikhail, The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq (New York, 2018), and Nihad Sirees, States of Passion (London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History from Stanford University, held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Harvard Society of Fellows, and his research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, and the Carnegie Corporation.
Max Weiss and Jens Hanssen are the principal investigators of the international research project “Global Weimar/Global Nahda”, which results in 3 conferences on 3 continents. Our Project is carried by two Princeton Doctoral students, Peter Makhlouf and Simon Conrad. Together we investigate echoes, links, and contrasts between the German and Arabic intellectual spheres in the first half of the 20th century. Our first workshop in Berlin will serve to establish the parameters of the project, provide ample room for case studies, and relate these theoretical discussions that question assumptions about the movement of ideas in both German and Arabic Studies. The second workshop, held by Princeton University, focuses on particular themes and discursive fields, such as the study of religion, the history of architecture, and literature. We will host our third workshop at the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB). This final workshop will allow for the themes of Global Weimar/Global Nahda to bring the Arabic public sphere into the conversation, drawing upon the robust traffic of scholars, artists and public intellectuals to whom Beirut is host. It will also prepare the grounds for one, or more, publications that bring together our findings and help set up a new global and comparative framework of study.
Principal Investigators: Max Weiss & Jens Hanssen
Project Coordinators: Peter Makhlouf & Simon Conrad