The Middle East Urban Studies (MEUS) book series explores new research from a progressive and critical lens on the wide-ranging implications of urban transformation in the Middle East. This book series recognizes the urban question at the center of economic, political, and social life regionally, and is open to a wide range of methodologies and disciplines, including geography, anthropology, political economy, sociology, and urban political ecology. MEUS engages with the intensifying processes of urbanization across the region, from large-scale infrastructure projects to the construction and destruction of new cities and urban regions. It is committed to presenting innovative analytical approaches and nonlinear narratives and to examining the challenges produced by Middle East urbanizations for the region’s inhabitants, policymakers, planners, and academics.

Series editors:

Deen Sharp is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science in Geography and Environment. He was formerly a fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the co-editor of Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (Urban Research, 2016) and Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope (American University in Cairo Press, 2021). He is the co-editor of a third book Reconstruction as Violence: The Case of Syria (American University in Cairo Press, Forthcoming). He has written for a number of publications, including, Jadaliyya, Portal 9, MERIP, Arab Studies Journal and the Guardian. He has worked for several UN agencies, including UNDP and UN-Habitat, governments and international NGOs.

Noura Wahby is an assistant professor at the Department of Public Policy and Administration and Director of Middle East Studies Academic programs at the American University in Cairo. Currently, she is a PI on a Bath University MENA Social Protection Network grant; and a Co-PI on an Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series grant. Her doctoral research on the political economy of urban development and water at Cambridge’s Centre of Development Studies won the 2019 Malcolm H. Kerr Best Dissertation Award in Social Sciences from the Middle East Studies Association (USA). 

Pascal Menoret is the Khalid bin Abdullah al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College. He was formerly director of the Center for Economic, Legal, and Social Studies and Documentation in Cairo (CEDEJ) and the Renée and Lester Crown Professor of Modern Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Saudi Enigma: A History (Zed Books, 2005), Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2020). 

To submit a proposal or completed manuscript please contact AUC Press director of editorial acquisitions, Nadia Naqib: [email protected]