UC Press Blog

By Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri, author of Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari between Europe and North AfricaWhen I first encountered the fascinating Moroccan polymath Ahmad ibn Qâsim al-Hajarî (c. 1569 - c.1640), I realized how the many threads of his life and career formulated a different

Winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences, Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century wes

The Bengali stories in this collection are first and foremost tales of survival. Each story in Needle at the Bottom of the Sea underscores the need for people to work together—not just to overcome the challenges of living in the Sundarban swamps of Bengal, but also to ease hostilities born of social

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

By Giancarlo Casale, editor and translator of Prisoner of the Infidels: The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century EuropeBefore the dawn of our narcissistic modern age, detailed accounts of intimate life—and particularly of the intimate lives of women—are excruciatingly rare, present

Today marks the three-month anniversary of the January 6th, 2021 storming of the Capitol, an act of domestic terrorism led by members from white nationalist groups. This is exactly the kind of event that author Sara Kamali has spent the last decade researching for her new book, Homegrown Hate: W

By Arash Khazeni, author of The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast AsiaThe fading traces of a different time of cross-cultural exchanges between the Indo-Persian Mughal world and the Burmese Empire linger like ghosts in the urban debris and landscape of Myanmar. T

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