YOAV DI-CAPUA

I am an intellectual historian of the modern Arab world. My work centers on a persistent Arab question: how to claim an authentic, safe, and productive place in a modern world largely shaped by others. Over the past two centuries, this question has given rise to a rich but often overlooked intellectual canon, in which Arab thinkers debated and designed a range of cultural responses. I engage with this canon as a History Professor at the University of Texas at Austin—about as far from the Middle East as one can be, and yet, in many ways, very close.