Which Middle East Specialists Get Assigned and Read?

The Center for History and New Media (whose slogan is "building a better yesterday … bit by bit") at George Mason University has tweaked google.com so as to produce a fascinating "Syllabus Finder." Put in an author's name and it churns out a listing of the syllabi where that author is assigned in U.S. classrooms, giving quantitative insight into whose writings are current.

Looking at Middle East studies, I ran twenty-four names of writers about history and politics who fit into three categories and got the following results:

Yesteryear's Greats

Name	Courses	Books
HAR Gibb	22	5,070
S D Goitein	12	4,900
Gustave von Grunebaum	1	102
Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall	10	72
Philip Hitti	5	131
Henri Lammens	3	102
Edward Lane	11	530
Louis Massignon	4	1,200

Middle East studies establishment

Name	Courses	Books
Joel Beinin	24	1,670
Juan Cole	129	443
John Esposito	114	617
Cornell Fleischer	6	110
Nikki Keddie	30	753
Rashid Khalidi	52	4,980
Edward Said	868	17,800*
Michael Sells	62	356

* In Edward Said's case, many of the courses and books are not related to Middle East studies.

Dissidents

Name	Courses	Books
Fouad Ajami	102	898
Bat Ye'or	25	193
Ibn Warraq	34	85
Elie Kedourie	34	1,780
Stanley Kurtz	41	104
Martin Kramer	52	1,090
Bernard Lewis	356	3,880
Daniel Pipes	120	2,710

Comments:

(1) The old masters do indeed go largely unread.

(2) The dissidents get a surprisingly good representation, even if in some cases they are supposed to be read negatively, perhaps because they are so few in number.

(3) Being part of the establishment is not guarantee of being read (it is a big establishment, after all), but it offers the route to scoring highest of all.

(4) What is assigned is partially a function of what publishers make available, but in the age of photostats and the internet, this is less the case than it used to be. That said, authors ubiquitous on the internet are likely to have a greater class readership than those less well represented. (February 22, 2005)

Oct. 12, 2005 update: Making use of Google Print, I have looked up the same names to see how many times they are cited in books whose contents are included in the Google Print feature. These are listed in the column on the right. In general, one finds a rough correlation between classroom use and number of book citations, with some glaring exceptions (Gibb, Goitein, and Khalidi in particular).

Apr. 28, 2011 update: "Syllabus Finder" made this blog possible; it is now defunct because of incompatibility issues; for more on it, see Jeff Rogers, "Syllabus Finder, Springtime for Software: The Death and Partial Re-Birth of Syllabus Finder."

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