When Associate Professor Saree Samir Makdisi joined the Department of English in October for a year-long visit, he extended a family tradition of teaching at AUB into the third generation. His grandfather, Anis Makdisi, professor of Arabic literature for 40 years, was chair of the Department of Arabic between 1925 and 1951; his father Samir, who returned to AUB from a stint with the International Monetary Fund in 1972 has taught economics at AUB ever since. Instrumental in setting up the Institute of Money and Banking (recently turned into the Institute of Financial Economics), he served as Deputy President from 1983 to 1998, and is currently chair of the Department of Economics. "It's a nice sense of tradition," Saree Makdisi said. "It sort of branches out. I have a cousin in the math department and relatives in the Faculty of Medicine and in computer science."
In the Department of English Professor Makdisi is teaching this semester two courses: an undergraduate course in romanticism and a graduate course, From Romanticism to Modernity. Although confessing he has only been on the job for one month, he says he is very happy with the students. "Of course," he went on, "I haven't seen any papers yet," but lively class discussions are a distinct pleasure. In class he emphasizes the close reading of literary texts.
His views on the student body? Makdisi finds AUB students almost worryingly Americanized. He was amused to find the students out in front of Fisk Hall playing a very specialized game, "hacky-sack," popular on American campuses. Many of the students, he continued, have strong American accents. He was anticipating greater diversity on campus.
Dr. Makdisi spent his early years in Beirut, but left ACS for the Northfield Mt. Hermon School in Massachusetts during the war years. He then completed his BA with honors at Wesleyan University in 1987 and earned his PhD in English literature at Duke University in 1993.
After teaching as an instructor in the Duke University literature program from 1991 to 1992, he moved to the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching ever since and is currently a tenured associate professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature and of Comparative Literature, and at the University of Chicago College. He has been an associate member of the university's Center for Middle East Studies since 1994.
A prolific writer and researcher, Makdisi has published some eighteen articles in various literary journals, and over the last decade he has presented almost 40 papers and lectures at conferences throughout the United States and in Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, and Holland. He has also lectured at AUB and at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. His first full-length work, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity, was named "Outstanding Academic Book of 1998." He also co-edited Marxism Beyond Marxism in 1995. A recent study, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2002.
Makdisi's publication record reveals his passions: romanticism, William Blake, and modernism. He is currently at work on a book on Beirut; he is developing a project on Beirut and its relationship to the rest of the world over the past fifteen or twenty years, "in a cultural sense, not in the economic sense." His study will deal with the "culture of politics," the way in which modernization has unfolded in a cultural sense in addition to a political sense . . . with an emphasis on the political culture of modernity." The work in progress is entitled Beirut, Open City: Toward an Archaeology of the Arab Postmodern.
And how does he view the changes that have taken place in downtown Beirut? "I don't like the way the reconstruction project went, for political and cultural reasons. . . . More could have been done with the space instead of turning it into a sort of Westernized theme park. . . . It's unreal. The city needed a space to bring people together rather than to provide them with the super vibrant and the super chic. It would have been nice to have some kind of real planning, not just for downtown, but for the entire city to preserve the city's character and to allow for reconstruction and development on a properly thought through scale." In the rest of the city he laments the sad destruction of so many old, traditional houses and their replacement by uniform, standard, concrete structures.
And yet, Lebanon and Beirut have a special meaning for Makdisi. Surprisingly, he finds the streets much more lively than in Chicago. There is much more hustle and bustle. And, "life is definitely fuller here" than in America. "I just feel more part of the world here than I do in America. Also less isolated."
Professor Makdisi lives in an AUB subsidized apartment on Sadat Street with his wife Christine and his 9-month old son Samir.
When he is not teaching, writing, or researching, he likes playing with the baby, walking, and, another passion: scuba diving.

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