Beyond Columbia
In the first initiative of its kind, the Palestinian Museum has announced 17 grants for research on Palestinian culture. The initiative comes in fulfilment of one of the key components of the Museum’s 2019–2023 strategic plan and is run by its newly-established research and knowledge department. The department’s programme is aimed at fostering civic engagement and reflexion, producing and disseminating knowledge about Palestine, and addressing knowledge gaps about Palestinian history and culture. The department’s first annual programme is made possible by the generous support of Ghalia and Omar al-Qattan.
Accordingly, the Museum has issued an open call to academic and field researchers to submit papers on four main topics: ‘Art History in Palestine and its Discourses from the 19th Century until the Late-20th Century’; ‘The Palestinian Coast: from the Late Ottoman Period until the Present’; ‘History of Printing in Jerusalem’; and ‘New Perspectives on Contemporary Palestinian Culture’.
For more information, visit the ‘Research & Collections’ section of the Palestinian Museum’s website.
Full searchable archive of the Jerusalem Quarterly—a journal dedicated to the history, present status, and investigative journalism on the city of Jerusalem. Published continuously since 1998 by the Institute of Jerusalem Studies, an IPS affiliate, this journal is made available to readers and researchers by special arrangement with the Institute for Palestine Studies.
The New Directions in Palestinian Studies research initiative of Brown University’s Middle East Studies Program, launched in 2012 by Beshara Doumani, aims to shape scholarly works in this field through an annual workshop, an endowed post-doctoral fellowship, and a book series.
The thematically organized workshops bring together emerging and established scholars to take stock of research trends, identify promising new questions and sources, and encourage networking across academic and research institutions.
The Centre for Palestine Studies (CPS) was established in 2012 under the umbrella of the London Middle East Institute at SOAS.
For SOAS, the study of Palestine and Palestinians has always been a prominent feature of research and teaching, involving a considerable number of staff and students. The CPS provides an institutional home for this work across the various disciplines represented at SOAS, including Politics, History, Development Studies, Economics, Anthropology, Gender Studies, Law, Media and Film Studies, Art, and Music.
The CPS organises lectures, seminars and conferences, film screenings and other events. Our aim is to promote the highest quality research on Palestine, and we seek the means to attain this goal. The CPS also seeks to cooperate with similar centres in the UK, the Middle East and internationally.
The European Centre for Palestine Studies (ECPS) aims to function as a hub for intellectual engagement with the Palestine question, facilitating scholarly research, helping to refine public discussion, and offering programmes for postgraduate study. Based at the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and situated within its College of Social Sciences and International Studies, the Centre is well placed to draw on expert faculty from both the IAIS and the Department of Politics and to strengthen Exeter’s longstanding status as a leading centre for scholarly engagement with the Palestine question.
AURDIP (the Association of Academics for the Respect of International Law in Palestine) is a French organization of university professors and researchers, created in cooperation with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel PACBI and with the British organization BRICUP.
AURDIP has two primary missions :
1. To promote the application of international law in Israel and Palestine ; specifically to oppose Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and Israel’s settlement policy, which fly in the face of international conventions on human rights, United Nations resolutions, and decisions of the International Court of Justice.
2. To defend Palestinians’ right to education and to support students and staff of Palestinian universities in the defense of this right.
Palestine Open Maps is a platform for map-based exploration and immersive storytelling. This alpha version of the platform allows users to navigate and search the historic map sheets, and to view basic data about present and erased localities.
The idea for this platform was inspired by a large collection of 1940s survey maps from the British Mandate of Palestine recently digitized by the Israeli national library. Although the maps were already in the public domain, their usefulness was limited since they comprise hundreds of separate sheets with no easy means to search, navigate or otherwise comprehend. By combining these sheets into seamless layers that can be navigated online, and combining them with other available data sources, such as the 1945 Village Statistics, historic photography, oral histories and present day digital maps and data, this platform seeks to offer an invaluable resource for mapping the transformation in the human geography of historic Palestine over the past 70+ years.
A collection of photos by Palestinian photographer Hannah Safieh. Shortly after starting work as a photographer, Safieh found employment at the American Colony photography department. This department, one of the earliest photography establishments in Palestine, was founded in 1898 to meet the growing demand for pictures from the Holy Land. It was at the American Colony that Safieh met and assisted the Swedish photographer Eric Matson (1888-1977). Safieh worked with Matson, documenting the country, until the latter left Palestine in 1946. Safieh's work is interesting because, while most local photographers at the time were producing studio portraits and photographing weddings and other social events, he was working on what could be called landscape and ethnographic photography.
Columbia University's collection of Middle East Studies Internet Resources is an ongoing compilation of electronic bibliographic resources and research materials on the Middle East and North Africa (in the broadest sense), created under the purview of the Middle East Studies Department of Columbia University Libraries. Electronic resources from the Middle East are organized by region, country and subject. All materials are arranged to encourage an awareness of authorship, type of information, and subject. The scope of the collection is research-oriented, but it also provides access to other websites with different or broader missions.
In the summer of 1967, just after the Six-Day War brought the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli control, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) supervised a census in these territories. The census included an impressive array of questions about individuals, households, and the quality of residences—about age, sex, religion, place of residence, educational attainment, occupation, industrial sector, income, household structure, health, female fertility, and housing conditions. Moreover, it asked crucial questions about refugee status. The ICBS prepared seven volumes of reports based on this enumeration—the first modern census reports on the Palestinian population.
The Levy Economics Institute is offering, for the first time and free of charge, the content of these volumes in machine-readable form, in the hope that the data can be exploited by researchers interested in a fuller understanding of the social history of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories.
The British Library's project to preserve historical periodical collections (1900-1950) at the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library in East Jerusalem.
AUB Libraries Digital Collections is a gateway to our digitized and preserved collections featuring manuscripts, maps, photos, posters, books, multimedia and other resources. This online growing repository aims to continuously disseminate knowledge about AUB, the region, our history and cultural heritage for the purpose of research, teaching and education. It is also a hub for collaboration with other departments, faculties, scholars in addition to external partners libraries and institutions to support digital scholarship initiatives.
Among the collections is the Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA), a project to digitize, index, catalog, preserve, and provide access (through a searchable digital platform) to an archival collection of around 1,000 hours of testimonies with first generation Palestinians and other Palestinian communities in Lebanon
ARIJ's mission is promoting sustainable development in the occupied Palestinian territories and the self-reliance of the Palestinian people through greater control over their natural resources. In its capacity as a national research institute, it frequently provides current data and research necessary to the formulation of position papers and policy strategies on such issues as land and water resources.
The European Centre for Palestine Studies works to support the coordination and facilitation of British and European scholarly knowledge and discussion on Palestine, and offers programs for postgraduate studies on Palestine.
The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection is a rich source of historical images of the Middle East. The majority of the images depict Palestine (present day Israel and the West Bank) from 1898 to 1946. Most of the collection consists of over 22,000 glass and film photographic negatives and transparencies created by the American Colony Photo Department and its successor firm, the Matson Photo Service. Over 1,000 photographic prints and eleven albums are also part of this collection.
The Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) is an independent institute devoted to research, analysis, and publication on Palestinian affairs and the Arab-Israeli conflict. IPS was established in Beirut in 1963 and also has offices in Washington D.C., Ramallah, and Paris.
Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP) is a network of self-defined librarians, archivists, and information workers in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
Mada al-Carmel: Arab Center for Applied Social Research generates and provides information, critical analysis, and diverse perspectives on the social and political life and history of Palestinians, with particular attention to Palestinians within Israel's 1948 boundaries. Mada also advances critical research on Israeli society and politics in order to further understanding of its undercurrents, particularly in relation to the policies toward Palestinians and Palestine. Mada offers a home for Palestinian and other scholars to develop critical approaches, exchange ideas, and develop their own research.
Major legal and political documents from Yale Law School's Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy.
The Nakba Archive is an oral history collective established in Lebanon in 2002. Since it’s inception, the Archive has recorded over 650 video interviews with first generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon about their recollections of life in Palestine and the events that led to their displacement. These eyewitness narratives, with refugees from more than 150 Palestinian villages and towns, recall social and cultural life in Palestine before 1948, relations with neighboring Jewish communities and the British Mandate, the 1948 expulsion, and the early years of exile. The aim has been to document this critical period through the voices and experiences of those who lived through it, and to bear witness in a way shaped not by political symbolism but rather by the rhythms of personal memory.
Palestine-related open resources from the Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (AMIR) Project. It includes links to the Jerusalem Virtual Library.
PASSIA is an independent non-profit research institution located in Jerusalem. PASSIA seeks to present the Palestinian Question in its national, Arab and international contexts through academic research, dialogue and publication.
Collection of historical, political, and population maps from the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs.
An oral history project on the Palestine Police Force during the British Mandate Period, from the The Middle East Centre at St Antony's College, University of Oxford.
A web-based archives and curriculum project displaying more than 4,500 Palestine-related posters from 1898 to the present. Posters are categorized into 500 Special Collections (artist, publisher, theme, iconographic element, etc.) and contextualized with links, translations, curator's notes, and other teacher-friendly features. Posters are drawn from the collections of Liberation Graphics, the Library of Congress, the Central Zionist Archives, the International Institute of Social History, the Museum of Design Zurich, and a host of other sources. Posters are added continuously.
Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet is a non-partisan project devoted to the dissemination of ideas and scholarly information, in an effort to foster scholarly collaboration, policy research, and innovative thinking on the Palestinian refugee issue.
From the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) of the Palestine National Authority.
The Division for Palestinian Rights was established by the General Assembly pursuant to resolution 32/40 B of 2 December 1977. The core functions of the Division are as follows:
- Organises the meetings of the Committee and its Bureau at UN Headquarters;
- Monitors political and other relevant developments;
- Organises a programme of international meetings and conferences;
- Implements a publications programme;
- Develops and maintains the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL);
- Cooperates with civil society organizations active on the issue;
- Organises the annual observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People;
- Conducts an annual training programme at UN Headquarters and several other capacity building workshops for staff of the State of Palestine.
The United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL) is the world’s largest online repository of documents on the question of Palestine. It was established and is maintained by the Division for Palestinian Rights in response to successive General Assembly mandates. The main collection contains the texts of current and historical United Nations material concerning the question of Palestine and other issues related to the Middle East situation and the search for peace. UNISPAL contains the English texts with a growing number in the other official UN languages.