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, dignified 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, still very close.

My new book, The First Arabs: The Untold Story of the 1967 Generation (Princeton, 2027), vividly reconstructs the dramatic odyssey of the 1960s generation—from the depths of colonial domination, through the heights of hard-won sovereignty, to the aftermath of the 1967 defeat.

Spanning virtually all Arab societies of the Eastern Mediterranean, this new history offers the most comprehensive account to date of mid-twentieth-century Arab life.