Makdisi was born in the United States (Washington). His father, Samir Makdisi, is a Lebanese professor of Economics at the American University of Beirut and his mother, Jean Said Makdisi, is a Palestinian independent scholar (formerly of Beirut University College). He is also the grandson of Anis K. Makdisi, a professor of Arabic at American University of Beirut and the nephew of the late literary scholar, Edward Said. In 2009, Makdisi gave the Edward Said Memorial lecture at Adelaide University.

He spent his early years in the United States, moving to Lebanon at the age of eight. While he grew up in a Christian family, they lived in a "largely Muslim neighborhood in Beirut." Makdisi returned to the United States for his final year in high school and also attended college there. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1987, Ph.D. from Duke University in 1993, and taught for a decade as an Assistant Professor, then an Associate Professor, of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago before joining UCLA in 2003.

Books

• Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (New York and Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
• Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton, 2008; revised and updated, with a new foreword by Alice Walker, 2010)

Articles and interviews

• "Domesticating Exoticism: Transformatons of Britain's Orient, 1785-1835" from Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
• January 2009 radio interview about Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation on KPFA.