Saree Makdisi is a professor of English at the University of Caliornia, Los Angeles. Previously, Makdisi was an Associate Professor of English, Comparrative Literature, and Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. He was also Associate Member of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Chicago and Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of English at the American Universtiy of Beirut. He is the author of Beirut, Open City: Toward an Archaeology of Postmodern Arab (in progress), Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (1998) and William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003). Makdisi has also written several articles in publications ranging from Studies in Romanticism, The Cambridge Companion to Blake, the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, and the Cambridge Companion to English Literature, and the London Review of Books. Makdisi has also written many articles on contemporary Arab culture and literature.