The government and private foundations began to sponsor and fund “area studies” programs and departments that focused on the study of not only the Near East but also more broadly Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was in this context that US universities turned toward the production of knowledge instrumental to serving the needs of empire. Two approaches guided the study of the Middle East: Orientalism, which was still dominated by philologists, and social scientific research, from which a new model known as “modernization” would be developed.

XREF: Connects to critiques of academic knowledge production as instrumental to state power, echoing discussions of institutionalized scholarship.

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 139