Education

PhD, Columbia University, 2002

Fields of Interest

Pre-modern Middle Eastern history (mainly but not exclusively Ottoman history); popular and learned literary cultures; historiography; book history and urban history

Academic Profile

Professor Sajdi's main interest is literary culture and the politics of textual production, especially of memorial/historical genres, such as chronicles, biographies, and city histories. She wrote a dissertation on a social and literary phenomenon of authorship of chronicles by commoners and marginals in the eighteenth-century Levant (roughly, the Arabic-speaking part of the eastern Mediterranean).

She has finished writing a book on the “life and work” of one of these commoner-historians, titled The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the 18th-Century Ottoman Levant (currently under review).  She has edited a volume on Ottoman culture, Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century (London: IB Tauris, 2008); and co-edited with Marle Hammond another volume focusing on Arabic elegiac poetry, "Transforming Loss into Beauty": Essays in Arabic Literature and Culture in Memory of Magda Al-Nowaihi (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008).

She is currently researching a project with the tentative title of “Imagined in the Image of the Other: Narrations of Damascus and Constantinople/Istanbul.” The project explores how these cities, having shared a Byzantine pre-Islamic past, were inter-textually narrated and given meaning by their Muslim inhabitants.

  
Representative Publications

• “Print and its Discontents: A Case for Pre-Print Journalism and Other Sundry Print Matters,” in The Translator 15:1 (2009)
• "Decline, its Discontents, and Ottoman Cultural History: by Way of Introduction," in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyles in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi, (London: IB Tauris, 2008)
• "A Room of His Own: the 'History' of the Barber of Damascus (fl. 1762)," in The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 4, 19-35 (2004) — awarded the Syrian Studies Association Prize for Best Published Article in 2004
• "Trespassing the Male Domain: The qasidah of Layla al-Akhyaliyyah," in Journal of Arabic Literature 31.2, 121-146 (2000)
• Revised and reprinted in Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, ed., Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics. The Formation of the Classical Islamic World (London: Ashgate Variorum, 2009)