Saree Makdisi, professor and chair of the department of English at the UCLA, will present the second annual Edward Said Endowed Lecture, speaking on “The Meaning of Gaza.”

Makdisi’s talk will take place at Cal State San Bernardino’s Santos Manuel Student Union North Conference Center at 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 26. The event is free and open to the public; RSVP online.

The Edward Said Endowed Lecture Series was created in 2022 through a $200,000 gift from Mustafa Milbis, a local philanthropist and retired business owner. Milbis and his wife, Beatriz, made the donation to provide support for an annual lecture series on the contemporary Palestinian experience, allowing CSUSB to continue its commitment to promoting cultural understanding to tomorrow’s leaders.

The series was named in honor of Edward Said, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of more than 20 books. A leading literary critic, public intellectual and passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, he was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and died in New York in 2003.

Makdisi’s teaching and research are situated at the crossroads of several different fields. They include British Romanticism, imperial culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism, and the cultures of urban modernity, particularly the revision and contestation of charged urban spaces, including London, Beirut and Jerusalem. He has also written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world, and, in addition to his scholarly articles, has contributed pieces on current events to a number of newspapers and magazines, including the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

Makdisi’s most recent book is “Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial” (University of California Press, 2022). He is also the author of “Reading William Blake” (Cambridge University Press, 2015); “Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture” (University of Chicago Press, 2014); “Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation” (Norton, 2010); “William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s” (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and “Romantic Imperialism” (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is presently working on a new book project, “London’s Modernities,” on the mapping and un-mapping of London from the nineteenth century to the present.

Makdisi received his bachelor of arts in English and economics from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from the Literature Program at Duke University.

Edward Said Endowed Lectures feature internationally recognized intellectuals who contribute to a deeper understanding of Palestinian history and culture over the past century. The series is housed in CSUSB’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Center for the Study of Muslim and Arab Worlds.

Columbia University professor, Joseph Massad, presented the inaugural lecture at CSUSB in fall 2022 when he spoke on “Independence: The Ruse of Settler-Colonialism.”