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 Saree Makdisi (1964—) is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at University of California, Los Angeles. He received his BA in English and Economics from Wesleyan University in 1987 and his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University in 1993. He has also written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world, and his 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. His most recent book, Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial, explores acts of affirmation and denial in a range of venues: from the haunted landscape of thickly planted forests covering the ruins of Palestinian villages forcibly depopulated in 1948; to the theater of "pinkwashing" as Israel presents itself to the world as a gay-friendly haven of cultural inclusion; to the so-called Museum of Tolerance being built on top of the ruins of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, which was methodically desecrated in order to clear the space for this monument to "human dignity." The book reveals the system of emotional investments and curated perceptions that makes this massive project of cognitive dissonance possible.
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