Zachary Lockman

Topics of Interest:
Modern Middle Eastern Social and Cultural History; Modern History of Egypt and Palestine; Political Economy; Labor and Working-Class History; Histories of US Area Studies/Middle East Studies

Countries/Regions of Interest:
Egypt, Israel/Palestine

List of Publications

Books:
Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. (Cambridge University Press, 2004; revised second edition, 2009). Arabic edition published as Ta’rikh al-Istishraq wa-Siyasatahu: al-Sira‘ ‘ala Tafsir al-Sharq al-Awsat (Dar El Shorouk, 2007). Turkish edition with new introduction (Küre Publishing, Istanbul), 2011.

Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. (University of California Press, 1996).

Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies. (State University of New York Press, 1993).  Editor, contributor and author of introduction.

Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation. Co-edited with Joel Beinin. (South End Press, 1989; Between the Lines, 1989; I.B. Tauris, 1990).

Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954. Co-authored with Joel Beinin. (Princeton University Press, 1987; I.B. Tauris, 1988; American University in Cairo Press, 1998). Arabic edition published in two volumes as al-‘Ummal wa’l-haraka al-siyasiyya fi misr: al-wataniyya, al-shuyu‘iyya, al-islamiyya (Markaz al-Buhuth al-‘Arabiyya, 1992/1996).

Selected Journal Articles, Book Chapters and Encyclopedia Entries:
“Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: a Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir,” Settler Colonial Studies 2 no. 1 (2012): 9-38.

“Zionism” and “The Histadrut, the ‘Conquest of Labor,’ and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, in Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, ed. Cheryl Rubenberg (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010).

“Reflections on Labor and Working-Class History in the Middle East and North Africa,” in Global Labour History: A State of the Art, ed. Jan Lucassen (Peter Lang Verlag, 2006).

“Exploring the Field: Lost Voices and Emerging Practices in Egypt, 1882-1914,” in Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions, eds. Israeli Gershoni, Hakan Erdem and Ursula Wokoeck (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002).

“Arab Workers and Arab Nationalism in Palestine: A View From Below,” in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, eds. James  Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (Columbia University Press, 1997).

“Exclusion and Solidarity: Labor Zionism and Arab Workers in Palestine, 1897-1929,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton University Press, 1994).

“Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899-1914,” Poetics Today 15 no. 2 (Summer 1994): 157-190.  Arabic translation published as Khitab al-afandiyya al-ijtima‘i, 1899-1914 (Dar Misr al-‘Arabiyya li’l-Nashr wa’l-Tawzi‘, 1997).

“Railway Workers and Relational History: Arabs and Jews in British-Ruled Palestine,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 no. 3 (July 1993): 601-627; reprinted in Comparing Jewish Societies, ed. Todd Endelman (University of Michigan Press, 1997) and in The Israel/Palestine  Question, ed. Ilan Pappé (Routledge, 1999).

I have taught modern Middle Eastern history at New York University since 1995. My main research and teaching field is the socioeconomic, cultural and political history of the modern Middle East, particularly the Mashriq. Under the influence of the “new social history” and “history from below” movements of the 1960s and 1970s, I did my doctoral dissertation on the emergence and evolution of a working class and labor movement in Egypt from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War; it was published in 1987 in a book co-authored with Joel Beinin. Since then I have sporadically continued to work on Egypt, with a special interest in society, culture and politics in the 1882-1919 period. I have also done a great deal of research on Palestine, manifested (among other things) in a co-edited 1989 volume on the Intifada and a 1996 book on relations between Arab and Jewish workers and labor movements in Palestine during the British mandate period, as well as various articles and papers. My most recently published book is an introduction to the history and politics of Orientalism and Middle East studies, with particular attention to the study of the Middle East in the United States since 1945 and its intersections with U.S. policy in that region. I plan to publish another book, an archivally-based study of the origins and history of area studies and Middle East studies, in 2016.

Along the way I have served as president of the Middle East Studies Association and as a member of the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies, and as an editor (and currently a contributing editor) of Middle East Report.