Saree Makdisi: Beholding William Blake at the End of Empire in the 1960s

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UCLA Professor of English and Comparative Literature Saree Makdisi will discuss the historical parallels between Blake’s era and the 1960’s, examining how these concurrent histories are the result of profound changes in politics, economy, art, and society during their respective periods.

About Saree Makdisi

Saree Makdisi received his BA in English and Economics from Wesleyan University in 1987 and his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University in 1993.

Professor Makdisi’s teaching and research are situated at the crossroads of several different fields, including British Romanticism, imperial culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism, and the cultures of urban modernity, particularly the revision and contestation of charged urban spaces, including London, Beirut and Jerusalem. 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.

His most recent book is Reading William Blake (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is also the author of Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014); Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2010); William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is presently working on two new books: London’s Modernities (on the mapping and unmapping of London from the nineteenth century to the present), and Palestine and the Psychogeography of Denial (on the ways in which the affirmation and landscaping of certain values—tolerance, democracy, eco-consciousness—have played key roles in denying the Palestinian presence in and claim to Palestine).

Co presented by Northwestern University Department of Art History

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu