Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Toronto. In NMC he teaches modern and contemporary Arab intellectual history; the late Ottoman Empire; and the politics of Archaeology. In History, he teaches settler colonialism in Palestine; liberation struggles, decolonization and counter-insurgency in Asia and Africa; and urban colonialism in the modern Mediterranean.

His past book publications include Fin de Siècle Beirut (OUP, 2005), a co-edited volume Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (OIB, 2002) and the first of two volumes on modern Arab intellectual History (CUP, 2016). A second edition of his co-authored book Zokak al-Blat: History, Space and Social Conflict in Beirut” has been released by the Orient Institute in Beirut in 2016. He is currently co-editing the OUP Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History with Amal Ghazal; the second CUP volume, Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age, also co-edited with Max Weiss (Princeton), is forthcoming.

He is currently writing a book under contract with OUP on The Middle East and North Africa at the Fin de Siècle. It explores how discourses of regeneration in- and specters of degeneration about the ‘MENA’ region affected European cultural production at the turn of the 19th-century and connected all sides of the Mediterranean Sea. He also holds a SSHRC Insight Grant (2014-2018) on German-Jewish Echoes in 20th Arab Thought which has yielded, inter alia, two articles: “Kafka and Arabs” (Critical Inquiry, 2012), and “Translating Revolution: Hannah Arendt and Arab Political Culture” (http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/301).