UC Press Blog

By Mark Levine, author of We’ll Play Till We Die and Heavy Metal IslamThe video, posted anonymously on Facebook, had only 300 views when I first saw it. The singer wasn’t named, and in fact wasn’t even in the video — the camera stayed steady on the crowd. The words supplied their own visuals: “A

From metal and hip hop, to emo in Baghdad, mahraganat in Egypt, techno in Beirut, listen to the revolutionary music of the Middle East with this playlist curated by author Mark LeVine.

By Jesse Wozniak, author of Policing Iraq: Legitimacy, Democracy, and Empire in a Developing StateDuring my first research trip to the Lead Police Training Academy on the outskirts of Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, I observed a class of recruits on their last day of training finally get their highly antici

By Sahar Aziz, author of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious FreedomOn his first day in office, President Biden repealed the “Muslim Ban,” an executive order issued by Trump on January 27, 2017. This repeal was a welcome development for the hundreds of thousands of Muslims whose liv

UC Press publishes numerous titles that center Palestinians and contribute to globalizing knowledge about the Palestinians in and beyond Palestine. In addition to the open-access series New Directions in Palestinian Studies, UC Press has several titles that inform and broaden the conversation on Pal

This post is part of our #MESA2020 blog series. Learn more at our MESA virtual exhibit.For this year’s virtual MESA conference, Luke Yarbrough joined us to talk about the new co-edited book Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age and why understanding Islamic conversion is a crucial par

For this year's virtual MESA conference, UC Press author Nicola Pratt joined us to talk about her book Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordon, and Lebanon and what the West gets wrong about women's activism in the Middle East.Nicola Pratt is Associate Professor o

Author On Barak argues in Powering Empire that we cannot promote worldwide decarbonization without first understanding the history of the globalization of carbon energy. How did this black rock come to have such long-lasting power over the world economy?In this interview with Jadaliyya, Barak di

In their new book, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, scholars Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini chronicle the chilling global history of human shields. From Syrian civilians locked in iron cages to veterans joining peaceful indigenous water protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux R