EDWARD SAID — was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of post-colonial studies. Educated in the Western canon Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. His main influences were Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno. Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism — how the Western world perceives The Orient. Said’s model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle Eastern studies — how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied.