Alex Lubin is a professor of African American Studies and History at Penn State University. His teaching and research are interdisciplinary and centered around transnational American Studies, racial capitalism, and Black radicalism. These concerns come together in scholarship on 20th century Black radicalism, with a particular focus on Black internationalism located in the Middle East and North Africa. He is also interested in the role of counterterrorism under racial capitalism. He is the author of Never-Ending War on Terror (UC Press, 2021), Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (UNC Press, 2014), and Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954 (UP Mississippi, 2004). He is the co-editor (or editor) of Duse Mohamed Ali’s 1934 novel, Ere Roosevelt Came (Pluto Press, 2024, with Marina Bilbija), Futures of Black Radicalism (Verso Books, 2017, with Gaye Theresa Johnson), American Studies Encounters the Middle East (UNC Press, 2016, with Marwan Kraidy), Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left (UP Mississippi, 2007), and Setter Colonialism (a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 2008, with Alyosha Goldstein). His article, “American Studies, the Middle East, and the Question of Palestine,” won the ASA’s Constance M. Rourke Prize in 2017.
Dr. Lubin earned undergraduate graduate and graduate degrees in American Studies and has been involved in American Studies program building for most of his career. He chaired the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico for six years and directed the Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) for three years. While at AUB, he organized two international conferences and launched the first MA program in Transnational American Studies in the MENA region. A member of the American Studies Association since the 1990s, he co-founded the Caucus on Community and Academic Activism and has been a member of several ASA committees, including the International Committee, the Conference Program Committee, the Committee on American Studies Departments, Programs, and Centers, the John Hope Franklin Prize committee, and the Constance M. Rourke Prize committee.
His current research studies the African American presence in Cairo, Egypt during the height of the Third World movement, employing the concept of ensemble to understand how discordant histories linked and harmonized under the banner of non-alignment between 1957-1967.