Abdel Razzaq Takriti

Associate Professor & Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History

Founding Director, Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies

Phone: (713) 743-4381
Email: artakriti@uh.edu
Office: 552 Agnes Arnold Hall

During the academic year 2022-23, Dr. Takriti serves as the Darwish Visiting Professor in Palestinian Studies at Brown University.

Dr. Abdel Razzaq Takriti is the inaugural holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History, Associate Professor at the Department of History, and founding Director of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies, University of Houston. His research focuses on the history of revolutions, intellectual and political currents, and state-building in the modern Arab world as well as on global histories of empire and anti-colonialism.

He holds a D.Phil. in History from St Antony’s College, Oxford and was formerly a Junior Research Fellow in Political History at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He is the author of Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman (Oxford University Press, 2013; paperback edition, 2016), which has been translated into Arabic as Dhufar: Thawrat al-Riyah al-Mawsimiyya (Jadawel, 2019), and the co-author (with Professor Karma Nabulsi) of the digital humanities project The Palestinian Revolution (Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, 2016).

His work has received several awards including the 2011 Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) Malcolm Kerr Prize for best doctoral dissertation in the humanities and the 2011 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for best doctoral dissertation in the social sciences or the humanities. He was also awarded an honorable mention in 2014 from the University of Cambridge British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society’s best book in Middle Eastern Studies prize and was a finalist for the 2014 Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize for best debut book in non-British history. Professor Takriti’s articles and chapters have been published in a range of scholarly venues including The Radical History Review and The American Historical Review.

Teaching

Professor Takriti is a committed teacher who has designed and delivered a range of survey and specialized courses. A winner of several teaching awards, he received, in 2019, the prestigious Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) Undergraduate Education Award in recognition of his pedagogical contributions. At the University of Houston, he currently offers undergraduate and graduate courses on global anticolonialism, modern Arab historiography, Arab revolutions, and Palestinian history. He welcomes PhD and MA students working on modern Arab history.

Selected Publications

• Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-76. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford Historical Monographs Series), 2013; paperback edition 2016.
  • Translated into Arabic as Dhufar: Thawrat al-Riyah al-Mawsimiyya. Beirut: Jadawel, 2019. 

• (With Karma Nabulsi) The Palestinian Revolution. Oxford University Department of Politics and International Relations, 2016.

• “The Kurd and the Wind: The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian-Kurdish Affiliation,” in Harrak, Amir (ed.). The Political and Cultural History of Kurds. New York: Peter Lang, 2021. Forthcoming.

• (With Hicham Safieddine) “Arab Socialism,” in Van Der Linden, Marcel (ed.). The Cambridge History of Socialism, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Forthcoming.

• “ The Arab Left: From Rumbling Ocean to Revolutionary Gulf,” in Guirguis, Laure (ed.). The Arab Lefts: Histories and Legacies, 1950s-1970s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

• “Colonial Coups and the War on Popular Sovereignty,” American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 3, June 2019.

• “Before BDS: Lineages of Boycott in Palestine,” Radical History Review, Issue 134, May 2019.

• “Political Praxis in the Gulf: Ahmad al-Khatib and the Movement of Arab Nationalists, 1948-1969,” in Hanssen, Jens; Weiss, Max (eds.). Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

• “The 1970 Coup in Oman Reconsidered,” Journal of Arabian Studies, Volume 3, Issue 2, December 2013.

• “Ishkaliyat al-Muwatana fi al-Tajamu’at al-Filastiniyya fi Orouba wa al-Ameriykiyatayn” in Shahin, Khalil (ed.) Al-Tajamu’at al-Filastiniyya wa Ramallah: Markaz Masarat, 2013.

• (With Nimer Sultany) “Jadaliyat al-Dimuqratiyya wa al-Hizbiyya Tah’ta al-Isti’mar: Halat al-Haraka al-Filastiniyya,” in al-Kawari, Ali; al-Sa’dawi, Atef (eds.). Mafhoum al-Ahzab al Dimuqratiyya wa Waqi’ al-Ahzab fi al-Buldan al-‘Arabiyya.Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wihda al-Arabiyya, 2011.