Stephen Sheehi is Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture and the Director of the Arabic Program. He is also core faculty in USC’s Comparative Literature Program and the Islamic World Cultures Program. In addition to Arabic, he teaches courses on the intellectual, literary, cultural, artistic and food heritage of the modern Arabo-Islamic world. His work interrogates various modalities of self, society, and political economy within Arab modernity but takes particular interest in cultural, literary and intellectual history, photography and art of the Arab Renaissance (al-nahdah al-‘arabiyah). Prof. Sheehi work is informed by and finds theoretical inspiration in Marxist, Anarchist and liberationist thought, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theory.

Prof. Sheehi’s latest book is Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2011). The book examines the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments in the West following the end of the Cold War. Sheehi analyzes the relationship between United States foreign and domestic policies and the mainstreaming of Muslim-baiting rhetoric as articulated by rogue academics, journalists, political hacks and national leaders from all walks of political life including, but not limited to, Bernard Lewis. Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, George Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. The argument of the book is that Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiments are an ideological component of North American culture and arise from the United States’ race history. As such, Islamophobia is yet one more pernicious form of racism that serves poignant ideological, political and social functions in globalization and the American unipolar moment.

Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Also please keep current link to book) examines the foundational writing of intellectuals of the 19th century Arab Renaissance or al-nahdah al-`arabiyah. The groundbreaking book discusses how Arab intellectuals offered a powerful cultural self-criticism along side their critiques and discussions of modernity, capitalism and European imperialism. In offering these critical assessments of Western and Arab culture, society and politics, these Arab intellectuals established the epistemological foundation for discussions of modernity over the next one hundred years. Despite their resistance to Western hegemony, their belief in Ottoman Arab society and their visions of national cultural renewal, intellectuals from the Butrus al-Bustani to Jurji Zaydan to Muhamad `Abduh re-inscribed the binaries of modernity that would always find Arab culture and society as “lacking” in comparison to the West.

Currently, Prof. Sheehi is completing a pioneering study on photography, entitled The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography (Princeton University Press 2012). The research investigates the relationship between indigenous photography, social transformations and the creation of the modern Arab ‘individual” in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. Along with book chapters, he has published on photography, art, literature and intellectual history in journals such as International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The British Journal of Middle East Studies, Discourse, Critique, The Journal of Arabic Literature, Jouvert, and The Journal of Comparative South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Studies.