New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Marshall Poe

Interviews with Scholars of the Middle East about their New Books

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History Society & Culture

Update frequency: every 2 days
Average duration: 56 minutes
Episodes: 1278
Years Active: 2010 - 2025

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Fadi Zaghmout, "The Man of Middling Height" (Syracuse UP, 2025)

What if our society’s deepest prejudices weren’t about race, gender, or sexuality—but height? In his groundbreaking allegorical novel, acclaimed Jordanian author and activist Fadi Zaghmout imagines j…

00:19:49 | Tue 08 Jul 2025

Pamela Karimi, "Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran" (Leuven UP, 2024)

Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran offers an insightful look at the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran, sparked by the tragic murder of Jina Mahsa Amini at the hands of …

01:01:08 | Fri 04 Jul 2025

Michael Cook, "A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity" (Princeton UP, 2024)

A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (Princeton UP, 2024) by Michael A. Cook This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and conv…

01:15:02 | Wed 02 Jul 2025

Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (HarperCollins UK, 2025)

As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were bound together under a single imperial banner, a…

01:03:00 | Wed 02 Jul 2025

Shayna M. Silverstein, "Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria" (Wesleyan UP, 2024)

A vivid and intricate study of dance music traditions that reveals the many contradictions of being Syrian in the 21st century Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions, is at the ce…

00:54:30 | Fri 27 Jun 2025

Nubar Hovsepian, "Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual" (AUC Press, 2025)

Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. A literary scholar with an aesthete’s temperament, he did not experience his political awakening until the 1967 Ara…

00:32:47 | Thu 26 Jun 2025

Vali Nasr, "Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Iran presents one of the most significant foreign policy challenges for America and the West, yet very little is known about what the country’s goals really are. Vali Nasr examines Iran’s political h…

00:50:41 | Wed 25 Jun 2025

Nicole Watts, "Republic of Dreams: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Struggles, and the Future of Iraqi Kurdistan" (NYU Press, 2025)

Nicole F. Watts's Republic of Dreams: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Struggles, and the Future of Iraqi Kurdistan (NYU Press, 2025) is a harrowing portrait of Iraqi Kurdistan and its history, as it w…

00:47:33 | Tue 24 Jun 2025

Ioana Emy Matesan, "The Violence Pendulum: Tactical Change in Islamist Groups in Egypt and Indonesia" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Research shows that repression can lead to both radicalization and deradicalization. When does it drive groups to pick up arms, and under what conditions does it foster disengagement from violence? T…

00:40:16 | Mon 23 Jun 2025

Yasmine Motawy, "Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society" (AUC Press, 2025)

Children’s picture books are some of the most transparently ideological materials available to parents and educators, and as cultural objects they are an expression of the zeitgeist of a particular e…

00:47:34 | Fri 20 Jun 2025

Laura Frances Goffman, "Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia (Stanford UP, 2024) offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf…

00:49:05 | Thu 19 Jun 2025

Chinese in Qatar

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Sara Hillman, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and English at the College of Humanities and Social Scienc…

00:40:54 | Wed 18 Jun 2025

Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, "Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective" (Columbia UP, 2025)

In the last third of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between totalizing doctrines—nationalist, Marxist, and religious—and radical critique. Arab thinkers we…

00:27:16 | Wed 11 Jun 2025

Sabrin Hasbun, "Crossing: A Love Story Between Italy and Palestine" (Footnote Press, 2025)

A beautiful and compelling family memoir retracing the love story between Sabrin Hasbun’s Palestinian father and Italian mother, and the life of her half-Italian, half-Palestinian family from the 196…

00:33:47 | Fri 06 Jun 2025

Dave Margoshes, "A Simple Carpenter" (Radiant Press, 2024)

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning author Dave Margoshes’ novel, A Simple Carpenter (Radiant Press, 2024)—which recently won a Saskatchewan Book Award and the Western Canada Jewish Bo…

00:51:27 | Fri 06 Jun 2025

Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, "The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq" (Stanford UP, 2021)

A new history of Middle East oil and the deep roots of American violence in Iraq. Iraq has been the site of some of the United States' longest and most sustained military campaigns since the Vietnam …

01:21:09 | Tue 03 Jun 2025

Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi, "One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature" (U Arkansas Press, 2010)

Since 9/11 there has been a cultural and political blossoming among those of the Afghan diaspora, especially in the United States, revealing a vibrant, active, and intellectual Afghan American commun…

01:04:05 | Sat 31 May 2025

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