Dr. Wael Abu-ʿUksa, Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer), is a political scientist specializing in conceptual history and political thought in the Middle East. He was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and a Polonsky postdoctoral fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His research combines comparative political philosophy and Middle East studies. In his works, he explores the history of ideas from a linguistic perspective that focuses on the evolution of languages. Through the lens of conceptual history, part of these works scrutinize the history of central political ideas such as liberalism, socialism, and democracy in the Middle East from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Among his publications: -Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016) -“The Construction of the Concepts ‘Democracy' and ‘Republic' in Arabic in the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean, 1798–1878”, Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 2 (2019): 249-270. (61.36, 2018). Recent Publications -“The Construction of the Concepts ‘Democracy' and ‘Republic' in Arabic in the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean, 1798–1878”, Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 2 (2019): 249-270. “Imagining Modernity: Language and Genealogy of Modernity in 19th Century”, Middle East Studies, 55, no. 5 (2019): 671-682. -“Enlightened Religion and the Revival of Eastern Civilization in Fransis al-Marrash's Thought”, The European Legacy, 25 (2020): 776-789. -“The Premodern History of “Civilisation” in Arabic: Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī and his Medieval Sources,” Die Welt des Islams, 62, no.3-4 (2022): 389-418.

Political Science

19th-21st Centuries

Arab Studies

Arab-Israeli Conflict

Democratization

History Of Religion

Identity/Representation

Islamic Thought

Modernization

Nationalism

All Middle East

Islamic World

Europe

Liberalism Intellectual History Secularism

History Of Ideas

History Of Concepts

Arabic (native)

Hebrew (fluent)

English (fluent)