Osamah F. Khalil is Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is the author of America’s Dream Palace, which was named a Best Book of 2017 by Foreign Affairs. His research on foreign policy, national security, and military affairs has been featured widely, from PBS NewsHour to USA Today.
America’s Dream Palace offers a wide-ranging exploration of the
complex relationship between the knowledge that Americans have
produced about the Middle East and the exercise of American power
in the region, from the First World War down to the invasion of
Iraq. Well-researched and engagingly written, it should be of
interest to scholars and nonscholars alike.
*Zachary Lockman, author of Field Notes: The Making of Middle
East Studies in the United States*
America’s Dream Palace is a brilliant and meticulously researched
work. Khalil carefully documents how scholars’ production of
knowledge about the Middle East shaped, and was shaped by, the rise
of America as a twentieth-century global military power. This is a
vital contribution to our understanding of Middle East studies and
to our understanding of the political economy of knowledge
production.
*David H. Price, author of Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, The
Pentagon, and the Rise of Dual Use Anthropology*
Thoroughly documented, carefully argued, and well crafted. In a
detailed look at the nexus of American academic expertise on the
Middle East and Washington’s diplomatic and intelligence power
centers, from the Wilson era through the Obama presidency, Khalil
keeps his prose crisp and his judgments sober.
*Foreign Affairs*
Khalil provides a trove of new data, especially about the pre–Cold
War and post-2001 eras, [but] his interest isn’t so much the
history of ideas as the institutional career of Middle East studies
in America. He’s particularly good at piecing together scattered
archival evidence to reveal previously hidden patronage
relationships between area specialists and government agencies such
as the State Department and the CIA. And by quoting one undeniably
prejudiced statement after another, he demonstrates the Orientalism
of successive generations of Middle East experts to devastating
overall effect.
*London Review of Books*
In this timely study, Khalil provides a thorough analysis of how
U.S. foreign policy interests have driven the development of
American specialist knowledge about the Middle East from WWI to
today…Khalil demonstrates how American analysis of the Middle East
has been, and continues to be, tainted with the ideology of
American exceptionalism and orientalist notions of the region’s
political and cultural immaturities and deformities, even
today.
*Publishers Weekly*
Well-researched and containing a breadth of sources, America’s
Dream Palace provides the reader an in-depth treatment of the
history of Middle Eastern Studies in the U.S.
*Arab Studies Quarterly*
Khalil’s America’s Dream Palace is a well-researched study of the
evolution of knowledge about the Middle East over the course of a
century…[An] excellent study of an unusual aspect of the Cold War
as it relates to the Middle East…[It] constitute[s] required
reading for the student of the Middle East and the layman
interested in the region alike.
*Reviews in American History*
[Khalil’s] extensive use of archival sources, sharp prose, bold
assertions and arguments makes America’s Dream Palace a timely and
unique addition to the emerging scholarship on the U.S. and the
Middle East during the Cold War and beyond.
*H-Diplo*
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