Edward Said

Who is Edward Said?

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 to a Palestinian Christian family and raised between Jerusalem and Cairo; his family left Palestine before 1948. He was educated in Egypt and then in the United States, earning degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and spent most of his academic career as University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His 1978 book "Orientalism" critiqued Western academic and cultural representations of the Middle East and became a foundational text of postcolonial studies. He wrote extensively on Palestinian dispossession and self-determination, including "The Question of Palestine" (1979), and served for a period as an independent member of the Palestine National Council before resigning over disagreements with the Oslo Accords. He was also an accomplished pianist and music critic. He died in New York in 2003 after a long battle with leukemia.

Sources: Edward Said, Orientalism (1978) · Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (1979) · Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999)