Professor Ussama Makdisi is a faculty member of the History Department at Rice University, and is the president of the Arab-American Educational Foundation at the same university. He completed his undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University in 1990 and his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1997. Makdisi’s interests include modern Arab history, US-Arab relations, Ottoman history, and the history of missionaries and sectarianism. Professor Makdisi’s “Age of Coexistence:  e Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World” (2019), “Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of US-Arab Relations, 1820-2001” (2010), “Artillery of Heaven” : American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East” (2008), “ e Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon” (2000), and “Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa” (2006) publications have been translated into many languages. He has been engaged in studies in many areas and is the recipient of many international awards.