Freshman class

The hairdresser knows

Dana Sajdi, assistant professor of history

Ph.D., Columbia University

Representative publication: “A Room of His Own: The ‘History’ of the Barber of Damascus,” The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (2004)

My main interest is literary culture and the politics of textual production, especially of memorial/historical genres such as chronicles, biographies, and city histories. I wrote a dissertation on a social and literary phenomenon of authorship of chronicles by commoners and “marginals” in the 18th-century Levant (roughly, the Arabic-speaking part of the eastern Mediterranean). I am currently writing a monograph on the life and work of one of these commoner-historians, who happened to be a barber. Actually, he is the only barber known to have authored an Arabo-Islamic history. The working title of the monograph is The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Middle East. My next project is on a literary genre that memorializes Damascus. It will relate the written portrayals of the city to changing social configurations and to civic ownership of the urban public space.