2024 Workshop

People

Presenters

Nasser Abourahme is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern and North African studies at Bowdoin College. His book, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Camp, Colony, Palestine, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. 

Mjiriam Abu Samra is a Marie Skoldowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow in the department of Anthropology at UC Davis visiting from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy –Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage. Mjriam received her Ph.D. from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, UK and her MA in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), UK. Her research focuses on Palestinian transnational student and youth politics and Third World solidarities. Her work intervenes in the critical study of refugees, colonialisms, social movements and it is grounded on critical theories of subalternity and decolonization building on Gramsci and Fanon’s contribution to post-colonial studies. Currently Mjriam is a researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan in Amman where she has been based for the past 10 years. She acts as the gender expert for the quantitative component of “IMAGES-Jordan”, a UN-Women led research project, investigating masculinity and gender equality in Jordan and throughout the MENA region. 

Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, with a focus on Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books), and Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Her co-edited book with Deborah al-Najjar entitled We are Iraqis: Aesthetics & Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse University Press) won the 2014 Arab-American book prize for non-fiction. Professor Al-Ali is on the advisory board of kohl: a journal of body and gender research and has been involved in several feminist organizations and campaigns transnationally.

Nasir Almasri is a PhD candidate in political science at MIT and a predoctoral fellow at Harvard. His work examines the role of repression and dissent in social movements.

Alia Al-Sabi is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. Currently she is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Performance Studies department at NYU, where she researches theories of movement and subversion within logics of surveillance and confinement. Her dissertation studies a prisoners’ archive located in various parts of the West Bank and records the writing and annotative practices of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement in the 70s and 80s.  She has contributed writings to Building Sharjah, Skin Deep, Harper’s Bazaar, Art Arabia, Canvas Magazine, Bidoun Magazine, and Al Manakh: Gulf Continued, among other publications. 

Samar Al-Saleh is a Ph.D. student in the joint History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program at New York University. Her current research focuses on the political economy and social history of imprisonment during the British occupation of Palestine. 

Amahl Bishara is Associate Professor of the Anthropology Department at Tufts University. She is the author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, & Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford 2022), about different conditions of expression for Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank. She also writes about popular refugee politics in the West Bank. Her first book, Back Stories: U.S. News and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013), is an ethnography of the production of U.S. news during the second Palestinian Intifada. She is the president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, and she has co-produced documentaries about incarceration and expression under occupation and collaboratively produced bilingual children’s books with Lajee Center in Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem.

Beshara Doumani, Professor of History and the Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies, works on the social histories of groups, places, and time periods marginalized by mainstream scholarship on the early modern and modern Middle East. He also writes on academic freedom and the Palestinian condition. Doumani is the founding director (2008-2011) of the Palestinian Museum, the founding director  (2012-2018) of Brown's Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), and founder of New Directions for Palestinian Studies, a CMES initiative since 2012. He served as President of Birzeit University (2021-2023). His books include Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, and Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History. He currently serves as co-editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly, and is working on a modern history of the Palestinians through the social life of stone.

Nada Elia is Visiting Associate Professor in the American Cultural Studies, and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality programs at Western Washington University, where she has been at work for the past three years towards establishing the Department of Ethnic Studies, which will be launched in the 2024-25 academic year. She is the author of Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine (Pluto Press, 2023) and is currently completing Falastiniyyat: A Century of Palestinian Feminisms (forthcoming, Verso, 2025) 

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice. Her research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, national security law, refugee law, social justice, and critical race theory. Noura is an editorial committee member of the Journal for Palestine Studies and a co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya, an electronic magazine on the Middle East that combines scholarly expertise and local knowledge. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Leila Farsakh is Professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the editor of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition (University of California Press, 2021), and author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation, (London: Routledge, second edition, 2012), among other publications.  

Tamar Ghabin is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at NYU’s department of Social and Cultural Analysis. She is also an organizer with the Palestinian youth movement. 

Bassam Haddad is an associate professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and coeditor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021).  Haddad is cofounder/editor of Jadaliyya ezine and executive director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as founding editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is coproducer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. 

Sarah Ihmoud is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research interests lie at the intersections of transnational feminisms; women of color theory; Indigenous and decolonial feminisms; critical race studies; carcerality; and Middle East and Arab American Studies. Drawing upon these fields, her research theorizes the racialization of Palestinian women in Palestine and the diaspora, transnational Palestinian feminism and Palestinian feminist epistemologies. 

Amany Khalifa is a researcher based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Amany is interested in studying social movements as sites of Refusal in Occupied Palestine. Her research explores how "political collectivity reconfigures the present and aspires to reshape the future. 

Zachary Lockman has taught modern Middle Eastern history at New York University since 1995, and before that at Harvard University (1984-1993). His books include Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954, co-authored with Joel Beinin; Intifada: the Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation, co-edited with Joel Beinin (1989); Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (1996); Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (2004, second edition 2010); and Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (2016). Along the way he has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), as a member of the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies, and as a member of the board of directors of the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC). He is currently chair of the wing of MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom that deals with the United States and Canada, and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.

Ali Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. He is a political theorist who studies settler colonial warfare, arms and automation. Ali is currently working on his first book project, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel's design, development and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life.

Loubna Qutami is a Brown University postdoctoral research associate in Palestinian studies, and an assistant professor in the department of Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Qutami is a former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2018-2020) and received her PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside (2018) and an MA from the College of Ethnic Studies: Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas program at San Francisco State University (2013). Qutami’s research examines transnational Palestinian youth movements after the 1993 Oslo Accords through the present. Her work is based on scholar-activist ethnographic research methods. Qutami’s broader scholarly interests include Palestine, critical refugee studies, the racialization of Arab/Muslim communities in the U.S., settler-colonialism, youth movements, transnationalism, and indigenous and Third World Feminism. Qutami was a co-founder of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and is currently a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC).

Ruba Salih is a Professor of Anthropology. After graduating in Political Science at the University of Bologna, she was awarded a Marie Curie grant and obtained a PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Sussex. Before joining Bologna in 2022, she was a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. She also held a position as a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter (2007-2010). Her research and writing cover transnational migration and diasporas across the Middle East and Europe, colonization and decolonisation, refugees and the Palestine question, gender memory and colonial traumas. She was elected to the Board of the Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (2015 to 2019). Currently, she is on the Executive Board of Insaniyyat, Society of Palestinian Anthropologists. Among her publications: ‘Palestine and Self-determination beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures, and Claims’ South Atlantic Quarterly, (117:1). Duke University Press  (with S. Richter Devroe) ‘Displacing the Anthropocene: colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine'. Environment and Planning E. Nature and Space. 2021 (with O. Corry) and ‘”From Standing Rock to Palestine We are United”: diaspora politics, decolonisation and the intersectionality of struggles’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020 (With Welchman and Zambelli).

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores economy, territory, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB, Editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures Series, and co-editor of Jadaliyya.

Abdel Razzaq Takriti is a historian of anticolonialism, revolutions, intellectual and political currents, and state formation in the modern Arab world. He is the author of Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976 (Oxford University Press, 2013; paperback edition, 2016). The book was a finalist for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize for best debut book in non-British history and received honorable mention from University of Cambridge’s British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize for the best scholarly work on the Middle East. It was translated to Arabic as Dhufar: Thawrat al-Riyah al-Mawsimiyya (Jadawel, 2019). Professor Takriti is also the co-author (with Karma Nabulsi) of the digital humanities project The Palestinian Revolution (Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, 2016). He has published extensively in a range of edited volumes and major scholarly journals including The American Historical Review and Radical History Review. In 2022, his research was the subject of an episode of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Al-Muqabala.

Alex Winder is Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies, and co-editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly. He received his PhD from the joint program in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University and his research focuses on policing, law, and lawbreaking in Mandate Palestine. He edited and introduced Between Jaffa and Mount Hebron: The Diary of Muhammad ‘Abd al-Hadi al-Shrouf (published in Arabic by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 2016) and his work has appeared in Arab Studies Journal, Auto|Biography Studies, Biography, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and Radical History Review. Alex was the 2017–2018 Postdoctoral Research Associate in Palestine and Palestinian Studies at Brown University.

Attendees

Ahmad Abu-Ahmed
Faiz Ahmed
Saleem Ashkar
Anil Askin
Ariella Azoulay
Mehrdad Babadi
Adel Ben-Bella
Kate Creasey
Jana El Khatib
Foroogh Farhang
Julia Gettle
Yannis Hamilakis
Paul Kohlbry
Maya Mikdashi
Penelope Mitchell
Amitis Motevalli
Elias Muhanna
Dima Nasser
Fulya Pinar
Sherena Razek
Heike Shotten
Samee Sulaiman
Nadia Tadros
Meltem Toksoz
Andre Willis
Suvaid Yaseen
Asli Zengin
Amelle Zeroug