Orit Bashkin

Orit Bashkin is a scholar who examines the intellectual, social and cultural history of the modern Middle East. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University (2005), writing a thesis on Iraqi intellectual history, and her BA and MA from Tel Aviv University. Since graduation, she worked in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, teaching classes on nationalism, colonialism and postcolonialism in the Middle East, on modern Islamic civilization, and on Jewish history. Her graduate students explored issues relating class, literature, leisure, gender, print culture, diplomacy, and political thought in the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. Professor Bashkin’s three books and fifty books chapters and articles deal with Iraqi history, the history of Iraqi Jews, Israeli history, Arab cultural and literary revival movements, the history of the Arab Left, and the connections between modern Arab history, memory, and literature. Her current research project studies the history of North African and Middle Eastern Jews from the early modern to the modern period. Drawing from Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew sources, it investigates the ways in which Jews remembered and understood Ottoman and Arab politics through contemporary and biblical narratives.