Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History at Rice University. He received a PhD in history from Princeton University in 1997. In addition to
numerous articles, he is the author of Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs: New York, 2010),
Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conquest of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) which won the
John Hope Franklin Prize of American Studies Association, the Albert Hourani Book Award of Middle East Studies Association, and was cowinner of the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize of British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. He co-edited Memory and Violence in
the Middle East and North Africa with Paul Silverstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). His first book, The Culture of
Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), has
been translated into Arabic as has Artillery of Heaven.