Melani McAlister
Melani McAlister
Professor of American Studies, International Affairs, and Media & Public Affairs
Full-time Faculty
Programs: MA Middle East Studies
Contact:
Melani McAlister is Professor of American Studies and International Affairs and the director of GW’s Institute for Middle East Studies. She is a scholar of the cultural and political history of the US in the world. She is author of the award-winning The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (2018, updated ed. 2022), and Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (rev. ed. 2005, orig. 2001). Her most recent book is Promises, then the Storm: Notes on Memory, Protest, and the Israel-Gaza War (2024). She is also the co-editor of four edited books or special journal issues, and numerous articles, both scholarly and public.
McAlister is president of the Society for Historians of Foreign Relations, and also Treasurer and a member of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). She is also on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review, Modern American History, and American Quarterly. She has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, the Nation, and the Atlantic, among others.
In 2023-24 she was a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for work on a project that explores the circulation of Third World music and literature in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, tentatively titled: "The Art of Solidarity: The Transnational Cultural Left in the Late Cold War." She has previously received support from the NEH, Princeton’s Davis Center, the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, and the American Philosophical Society. She has spoken widely around the country and the world, including as a keynote speaker at events in Abu Dhabi, Egypt, England, Germany, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Scotland, Syria, and Qatar.
U.S.-Middle East (1945-present), especially cultural encounters; U.S. religious right and foreign policy; culture and globalization
McAlister has an article forthcoming in Diplomatic History titled "Trumped Again: 4.7 Lessons from the Regan Era." She is also working on an article on Arab American cultural activism in the 1980s, focused on the US tours of Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife.
Ph.D., Brown University
AmSt/Hist 2170: US in the World
AmSt 6190: After Humanity (graduate seminar)
AmSt 6190: US-Middle East Cultural Encounters
Books:
Promises, then the Storm: Politics and Memory in the Gaza Wars. London: MACK press, fall 2024.
The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, updated paperback edition, 2022.
Co-editor with John Corrigan and Axel Schäfer, Global Faith and Worldly Power: Christian Encounters with US Empire. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2022.
Co-editor with David Engerman and Max Friedman, Cambridge History of America in the World, Volume 4 (1945-2010). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Co-edited with R. Marie Griffith, Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008. Originally a special issue of American Quarterly, 2007.
Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, o. 2001. Revised and expanded edition, 2005.
Special Journal Issue
Co-editor, with Christopher Lee, of From Anarchy to Chaos: Generation(s) of Empire, a special issue of American Quarterly, September 2022.
Recent articles:
“Notes on the Gaza Wars,” American Historical Review, September 2024, 1169-1182.
“Narrative Disorders: Surveillance, Truth, and Democracy in Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle.” American Literary History (June 2023), pp 305-319.
Honorable mention, 1921 Prize of the Society of American Literature, best article.
“Evangelicals and the International Politics of Human Rights.” In Reclaiming Human Rights in a Changing World Order, ed Christopher Sabatini. Chatham House & Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp 149-181.
“Introduction: Evangelicals at the Global Scale,” co-authored with Axel Schäfer and John Corrigan, in Global Faith, Worldly Power, 2022, pp 1-48.
“Introduction: Generations of Empire.” Authored with Christopher Lee. American Quarterly, September 2022, pp. 477-497.
“Afterword.” In Global Visions of Violence, ed. Jason Bruner and David Kirkpatrick. Rutgers Univ. Press, 2022, pp. 177-187.
“Seeing Solidarity.” In Religion and Broken Solidarities, ed. Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo, Notre Dame University Press, 2022, pp. 159-169.
“’Not Just Churches’: American Jews, Joint Church Aid, and the Nigeria-Biafra War.” In Ideologies and US Foreign Relations, ed. Christopher Nichols and David Milne. Columbia Univ. Press, 2022.
“Analyzing Actants,” Diplomatic History special forum on impact of Covid on research and teaching, June 2021.
“Established Authorities: Theology, the State, and the Apartheid Struggle.” In At Home and Abroad: Religion and Secularism on a Global Stage, ed. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Sullivan. Columbia Univ. Press, 2021, pp. 249-272.