Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Lectures
An Evening with the Rock-Singers
Thursday, October 22, 2026

Time:  5:30pm

Location: Kelley Presentation Room
 

Title: Religion and Politics in Mandatory Palestine: The Roots of the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right Today
 

Dr. Aaron Rock-Singer is a transnational historian of the modern Middle East with a particular focus on Islamic and Jewish movements that fuse religion and politics, Dr. Rock-Singer is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Raoul Wallenberg Institute and teaches courses in Judaic Studies, Middle East Studies, and History.

 

Dr. Rock-Singer received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (2007), his M.Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford (2010) and his PhD from Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies (2016). Dr. Rock-Singer's research draws on mass and small media to trace the changing relationship between religion, politics and society in the 20th-century Middle East.  His first book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and the Islamic Revival was published by Cambridge University Press (2019) and his second book, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th-Century Middle East, by the University of California Press (2022). He is currently at work on a third monograph, tentatively entitled Worshipping the Nation:  Exclusivist Politics in Mandatory Palestine, 1917-48. Bridging Islamic and Judaic Studies, as well as histories of Mandate Palestine with those of transnational Islamic reform, Worshipping the Nation draws on Arabic and Hebrew-language sources to trace the linked emergence of Islamic and Jewish religion-political visions under the British Mandate.