Dr. Maurice Jr. Labelle is an associate professor of History and director of the uSask College of Arts and Science's International Studies program. He specializes in the relational histories of Arab decolonization, postcolonialism, and entanglements between the Middle East and North America. At their core, his research and teaching interests explore how discursive practices of decolonization become universalized modes of liberation and reparation. Dr. Labelle's scholarship has been published in Diplomatic History, Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Global History, and Radical History Review, and has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and numerous U.S. presidential libraries and archives. Furthermore, he has offered informed commentary for various local, national, and global news agencies, most notably CTV News Channel, Al-Jazeera, the BBC, and Radio Canada. 

Articles

"On the Decolonial Beginnings of Edward Said," Modern Intellectual History 19, 2 (2022): 600-624.

“Empathy and the Lebanese Civil War of 1958 in the USA,” Arab Studies Quarterly 41, 2 (August 2019): 172-193.

“‘The American People Know So Little’: The Palestinian Arab Refugee Office and the Challenges of Anti-Orientalism in the United States, 1955-1962,” Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 5, 2 (October 2018): 1-27.

“Tensions of Decolonization: Lebanon, West Africans, and a Color Line Within the Global Color Line, May 1945,” Radical History Review 131 (May 2018): 36-57.

 “De-Coca-Colonizing Egypt: Globalization, Decolonization, and the Egyptian Boycott of Coca-Cola, 1966-68,” Journal of Global History 9, 1 (March 2014): 122-142.

 “A New Age of Empire? Arab ‘Anti-Americanism,’ U.S. Intervention, and the Lebanese Civil War of 1958,”International History Review 35, 1 (March 2013): 42-69.

 “Empire by Association: The Arab-Israeli Conflict and the United States in Lebanese Imaginations,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 23, 1 (March 2012): 44-65.

 “‘The Only Thorn’: Early Saudi-American Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1945-1949,” Diplomatic History 35, 2 (April 2011): 257-281. 

Chapters

"Re-Presenting Palestine: Sami Hadawi and the Palestinian Revolution in Canada," In Jeremy Wildeman and Mark Ayyash, eds. Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 202X) [Accepted].

“Jameel’s Journal: Jim Peters, Anti-Orientalism, and Arab Decolonization in 1960s Canada,” Asa McKercher and Philip Van Huizen, eds. Undiplomatic History: The New Study of Canada and the World (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), pp. 163-183.

 “Not So Nobel: Arab Perceptions of Lester B. Pearson and Canada,” in Asa McKercher and Galen Roger Perras, eds. Mike’s World: Lester B. Pearson and Canadian External Relations, 1963-68 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017), pp. 169-188.

Edited Collections

Maurice Jr. Labelle, ed. The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization: Post-Orientalism and the Politics of Difference (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023).

Christopher Dietrich and Maurice Jr. Labelle, eds. “New Histories of Twentieth-Century Decolonization,” special issue of Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 52, 3 (Winter 2017): 417-662.

HIST 115: Race, Racisms, and Anti-Racisms in the Modern World

HIST 279: The Middle East in the 20th Century

HIST 294: International and Global History since 1900

HIST 389: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

IS 401: International Cooperation and Conflict

HIST 453: Decolonization in the Postcolonial World

HIST 472: The United States and the Middle East

HIST 811: Decolonization and Postcolonialism

HIST 883: Methods in Historical Research

Arab decolonization Arab-Israeli Conflict Edward Said Occidentalism Orientalism Palestine Postcolonialism UNESCO U.S.- Middle East relations

Current Research:

Dr. Labelle's current manuscript project, Tragedy of Decolonization: Lebanon, the United States, and the Making of the Postcolonial World, 1941-67, explores how post-colonial Lebanon came to identify the United States as an imperial power in the Middle East. 

Future Research:

Dr. Labelle has also begun work on a second manuscript project that explores the global declaration of the New World Information and Communications Order (a.k.a. NOMIC, Le Nouvel ordre mondiale d'informations et de communications). 

This project is currently linked to a 3-year SSHRC Partnership Development Grant [2022-25, Award: $197,891 CAD, Project Director: Maurice Jr. Labelle] that establishes the Non-Aligned News Research Partnership (NANReP). NANReP is an international partnership that collaboratively studies the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, a leading NOMIC-affiliated initiative. The Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (1974-1990s) was/is the largest organized collaboration against the racial structure of world news. NANReP's goal is to analyze the history and legacies of the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool's transnational efforts to democratize global flows of information and decolonize communication systems. Its international partnership spans three continents and seven countries to bring together scholars, contemporary actors, and students to work with UNESCO, the University of British Columbia's Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the University of Toronto's Department of History, and Resonator Agency Inc., a Toronto-based private sector advertising agency. 

Ph.D., University of Akron (2012)