Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Middle Eastern Studies

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to the Middle East

Posted on June 5, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on Middle Eastern studies. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Melancholy acts: defeat and cultural critique in the Arab world
Gana, Nouri. Fordham, 2023

Melancholy Acts is a powerful expression of the Arab world’s literary and cinematic production, which has endured and obstinately defied colonial and postcolonial occupation, Western encroachments, and autocratic regimes. Deploying psychoanalytic reasoning across Arabic novels, poems, plays, films, and philosophical theories—namely a renewed insight on melancholy acts—Gana (Univ. of California) effectively elevates melancholia to revive what was deemed dead. He dissects the notion of defeatism (namely the 1967 Arab defeat and the Euro-American incursions) that has plagued the Arab psyche, and exhorts the Arab scholars and artists to deploy militant melancholia as a mode of emancipation, search for justice, and decolonization through embracing Arab causes delicately and resolutely. Erudite and bold, this uncompromising book draws on, and primarily dares, the ideas of some of the most seminal Arab and non-Arab thinkers. Whereas Melancholy Acts delves into the thorniest and bleakest geopolitical and cultural Arab issues, it never abandons a measured hope. View on Amazon

2. A history of the Muslim world: from its origins to the dawn of modernity
Cook, Michael. Princeton, 2024

The term tour de force is used too often in scholarly book reviews. This book, however, is truly a tour de force. It is also not for the faint of heart. At almost 1,000 pages, it is a daunting undertaking, even for a diligent reader. However, any reader interested in the global history of premodern Islamic state formation or in the diversity of Muslim belief and practice will not consider the undertaking wasted. This is because the book’s narrative voice is clearly indebted to decades of groundbreaking research as well as to decades of undergraduate and graduate teaching. A History of the Muslim World is not a textbook—the story it tells is too erudite and idiosyncratic for that—but it is not an academic monograph either. The absence of the traditional scholarly paraphernalia—a bibliography or more than a handful of notes—or hectoring attempts at persuasion disqualify it from that category.  View on Amazon

3. The 1973 Arab-Israeli war
ed. by Galen Jackson Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

This exceptionally well-integrated collection of essays about the October 1973 War (also referred to as the Yom Kippur or Ramadan War) and its consequences offers an excellent overview of Arab-Israeli politics prior to October 7, 2023, 50 years later. William B. Quandt (emer., politics, Univ. of Virginia), who served on Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff in 1973, argues in the introduction that the war could have been avoided had Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir been less intransigent and if Kissinger had taken Egyptian President Anwar Sadat more seriously in earlier discussions of a major diplomatic initiative. As it was, the conduct of the war led to the breakdown of détente with the Soviet Union and a nuclear alert because Kissinger had given the Israelis too much slack in obeying the ceasefire negotiated by the superpowers. Several contributing authors question Kissinger’s credibility, and Quandt still wonders what really lay behind Sadat’s refusal of an earlier ceasefire proposal, given his distrust of the Syrian ally and his control of Egypt’s professionalized military. An earlier ending might have preempted any use of the Arab oil weapon. View on Amazon

4. Between Banat: queer Arab critique and transnational Arab archives
Shomali, Mejdulene Bernard. Duke, 2023

This groundbreaking work charts new territory in gender studies. In Between Banat Shomali (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County) “develops [a] queer Arab critique grounded … in attentiveness to the between: desires between bodies, bodies between nations, words between languages, nations between one another” (p. 3). In chapter 1 she examines how the character Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights limits discourses for Arab American authors, hedged in by heteronormativity, assimilation, and state violence. Chapter 2 hearkens back to the golden age of Egyptian cinema. While Shomali acknowledges that the stories end in heterosexual pairings, she argues that dance within homosocial environments, homoerotic desire, and close female relationships dominate the space of the films. Chapters 3 and 4 examine queerness in fiction and non-fiction through novels and essay collections, respectively. The concluding chapter calls upon readers to literally “smash” or “grind” the patriarchy with a look to the future through a critical reading of the film Bar Bahar (2016), an examination of the feminist Nöl Collective fashion line, and a discussion of some of the publications from Maamoul press.  View on Amazon.

5. Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: first person history in times of crisis
Bartov, Omer. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

In Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine, Bartov (Brown Univ.), one of the leading scholars of the Holocaust, provides an important reassessment of how the Holocaust is studied. He considers how to redefine the Holocaust in relation to genocide studies, noting “the tensions between Holocaust and genocide studies, which have repeatedly both enriched and clashed with each other” (p. 2). One central theme is the neglected importance by historians of individual testimony within the context of local history, which Bartov argues is important for “grasping the nature of mass murder” (p. 2). He also considers the role of legal discourse in either revealing or obscuring complicity. Finally, there is an in-depth examination of how the Holocaust has impacted the origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is a crucial new addition to both Holocaust and genocide research. It is highly readable for both specialized and lay readers interested in studying the Holocaust. View on Amazon.

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