Jean Said Makdisi (ar|جين سعيد مقدسي) (born 1940) is a Palestinian writer and independent scholar, best known for her autobiographical writing.[1]
Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem, British Mandate Palestine, to a Palestinian family. The younger sister of Rosemarie Said Zahlan and Edward Said, she was raised in Egypt and educated in the United States and England.[2] She married a Lebanese academic of Palestinian origin, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut, Lebanon, in 1972,[1] where she taught English and Humanities at the Beirut University College.[3] They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Lebanon War. Makdisi documented the city's decline in her first book, Beirut Fragments: a war memoir (1989):
She is the mother of the literary critic Saree Makdisi and historian Ussama Makdisi.[4]
. Barbara Fister. Third World Women's Literatures: A Dictionary and Guide to Materials in English. registration. 1995. Greenwood Publishing Group. 978-0-313-28988-0. 193. Makdisi, Jean Said.