Max Weiss studies the cultural, intellectual, and literary history of the modern Middle East, and is Associated Faculty in Comparative Literature.

He is the author of Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Baʿthist Syria (Stanford UP, 2022), and In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shiʿism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Harvard UP, 2010); co-editor (with Jens Hanssen) of Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge UP, 2016), and Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present (Cambridge UP, 2018); and translator, most recently, of Alawiya Sobh, This Thing Called Love (Calcutta, 2022); Dunya Mikhail, The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq (New York, 2018), and Nihad Sirees, States of Passion (London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History from Stanford University, held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Harvard Society of Fellows, and his research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, and the Carnegie Corporation.