John M. Willis

**If you don’t have access to an academic library and would like copies of anything below, please contact me and I would be happy to send you an electronic copy.

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Burying Mohamed Ali Jauhar: The Life and Death of the Meccan Republic,” Arabian Humanities Vol. 17 (2023).

• “The Salafi Imamate:  Moral Reform and Anti-Imperialism in the Mutawakkilite Kingdom,” Journal of Arabian Studies Vol. 8, No. 1 (2018), 47-65.

• “Governing the Living and the Dead: Mecca and the Emergence of the Saudi Biopolitical State,” American Historical Review, Vol. 122, No. 2 (April 2017), 346-370.

• “Azad’s Mecca:  On the Limits of Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanism,” Roundtable on “The Indian Ocean and “Other” Middle Easts,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Winter 2014).

• “Debating the Caliphate:  Islam and Nation in the Work of Rashid Rida and Abul Kalam Azad,” International History Review, Vol. 32, No. 4 (December 2010), 711-732.

• “Making Yemen Indian:  Rewriting the Boundaries of Imperial Arabia,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 41, No. 1 (February 2009), 23-38.

• “Leaving Only Question-Marks:  Geographies of Rule in Modern Yemen,” in Counter-Narratives:  History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen eds.  Robert Vitalis and Madawi al-Rasheed (New York:  Palgrave, 2004), 119-150.

• “Colonial Policing in Aden, 1937-1967,” Arab Studies Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1997), 57-91.  Reprinted in Globalising British Policing, ed. Georgina Sinclair (Surrey:  Ashgate, 2011).

Book Reviews

• Ulrika Freitag, A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (CUP, 2020) in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 54, No. 4 (2022).

• “Sovereign Power and ‘Other Lives’.” Review essay of Wilson Chacko Jacob, For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020) in Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2022).

• Daniel Foliard, Dislocating the Orient:  British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2017) in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 92, No. 1 (March 2020).

• Asher Orkaby, Beyond the Arab Cold War:  The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68 (OUP 2017) in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 51, No. 4 (November 2019).

• Helen Lackner, Yemen in Crisis (London:  Saqi Books, 2017) in Middle East Journal, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Autumn 2018).

• Isa Blumi, Chaos in Yemen:  Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism (New York:  Routledge, 2011) in Arabian Humanities (online) No. 4 (Autumn 2014).

• Kavita Saraswathi Datla, The Language of Secular Islam:  Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (Honolulu:  University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013) in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 72, No. 4 (November 2013).

• Thomas Kuehn, Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference:  Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849–1919 (Leiden:  Brill, 2011) in Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (September 2013).

• “Learning the Language of Command:  A Review of M. A. Ghanem Yemen Aden Arabic (Sanaa:  Markaz al-‘Ubadi li al-Dirasat wa al-Nashr, 1999)” in Yemen Update, No. 45 (2003).

• Paul Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), in Arab Studies Journal (Winter 2002/Spring 2003).

Commentary, Analysis, Interviews, etc.

• "Teaching the Middle East after the Arab Uprisings: A Roundtable" featuring John M. Willis, Sumita Pahwa, Nathalie Peutz, Pete Moore, Heather Ferguson, and Jessica Winegar, JadMag, Vol. 7.2 (2019).

• “Crisis in Yemen: Should the U.S. Break from Saudi Arabia Over Its War Crimes?” University of Denver, Oct. 30, 2018.

• “Operation Decisive Storm and the Expanding Counter-Revolution,” Middle East Report blog, March 30, 2015.  Republished in Sheila Carapico, ed. Arabia Incognita:  Dispatches from Yemen and the Gulf (Charlottesville, VA:  Just World Books, 2016), 272-275.

• The Crisis in Yemen: David Barsamian and CU Professor John M. Willis (KGNU, Aug. 27, 2025).

• “Life and Death in the Graves of Mecca and Medina,” Middle East Report blog, Oct. 31, 2014.

• “Writing the History of the Arabian Peninsula or How to Narrate the Past of a (Non)Place,” Jadaliyya Roundtable on Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, April 22, 2013. 

• “New Texts Out Now: Unmaking North and South, Jadaliyya, January 30, 2013.

• “Yemen” in The Encyclopedia of the Cold War (New York: MTM/Routledge, 2008).