Samer Ali

Samer Ali is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, specializing in Arabic and Islamic studies. His current research draws on methodological insights from linguistic anthropology and critical race studies to rethink Orientalist and area studies paradigms, and from medieval studies, folklore, history, women's studies, and critical theory to ask critical questions about Arabic and Islamic cultural history. 

Research: In recent years, he has focused on the history and foundations of knowledge transmission, particularly the Arabic humanities (adabiyyat) and Islamic madrasa-college curriculum (islamiyyat), which facilitated social mobility and dignity for many on the margins of society. These were two discourses for the production of epistemology and ontology in the Islamic Middle Ages -- that interacted with adjacent discourses like those surrounding the caliphate, falsafa, and Sufism. Against the grain of binaries, Prof. Ali writes about these discourses as part of the multiplicity of worldviews that converged and diverged in a medieval sphere of public concerns. Within this multiplicity, women's cultural productions in the humanities were abundant and significant, though neglected, both for the challenges they posed to the establishment in their time and to Western tropes about passive Arab women today. His scholarship has appeared in the Encyclopedia of Islam THREE, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Al-Qantara, Journal of Arabic Literature, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Islam and Women. He co-edited The CALICO Journal: Special Issue on Hebrew and Arabic and authored the monograph, Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages: Poets, Public Performance and the Presentation of the Past, a first in the study of Arabic-Islamic salon culture. The book puts performance studies in conversation with classical Arabic studies, demonstrating a rambunctious social life around poetry, music, flowers, and song as performers and audiences found refuge in sociability, venerated the holy, recast tradition, formed friendships, and fell in love. This performance-based approach recovers poetry from jaws of pedantic linguistics or dry social scientism and resituates it in a context of lyric, passion, and embodiment. His forthcoming article, “Orientalism and White Supremacy: Race, Gaze Training, and the Disparity of Nonwhite Voice,” examines the near-absence of race in Middle East scholarship and the invisibility of the racialized Arab/Muslim in critical race studies. His scholarship has garnered a dozen awards from the American Institute of Maghreb Studies (AIMS), The Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (Wiko), the US Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Center of Research (ACOR) in Jordan, as well as five Fulbright Awards.

Teaching/Mentoring: Prof. Ali has taught courses on Jahili, Umayyad, and Abbasid poetry, western and Islamicate literary theory, "adab" humanities, the Qur'an, the interplay of religious and literary knowledge, Islamic law, and broadly medieval Arabo-Islamic culture. His graduate students have been placed in academic positions at University of Houston, Western Michigan University, CUNY-Queens College, Ohio State University, George Mason University, and University of Pennsylvania.

Program Building: Prof. Ali has served as graduate and undergraduate advisor, director of the U-M Center for Middle Eastern & North African studies (2017-2021) and the Global Islamic Studies Center (2020-2021). Over the years, he has leveraged $3.8 million in grants received to promote equal access to opportunity, as well as diversity and inclusion in Middle Eastern/North African studies. Funding has supported programs, research, and language education at the Free University in Berlin, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Michigan. U-M. Grant makers have included a mix of public and private sources that have shown a vital commitment to the region's languages, arts, and humanities.