Richard Shapiro is Vice President of Education and Public Policy at Pixatel, an organization that works with innovative e-education in socially disadvantaged sites through fostering public/private partnerships. Shapiro has been involved in creating emancipatory education, focused on social justice, ecological sustainability, and cultural diversity. Shapiro’s work focuses on the dynamics of othering, contemporary forms of racism,

Brinkley M. Messick is Professor, Department of Anthropology, Director of Graduate Studies in Islamic Studies, and affiliated with the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. Messick specializes in the anthropology of law, legal history, written culture, and the circulation and interpretation of Islamic law. Messick received his Ph.D. from Princeton. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies and chair of the Department of History at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1974. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, Georgetown University, and at the University of Chicago. He is past President of the Middle East Studies Association, and the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Mohamad Junaid is a Doctoral Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His writings focus on military occupation, space, memory, martyrdom, and violence in Kashmir. Junaid has contributed to edited volumes; Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East (2013); U

Rudhramoorthy Cheran is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology at the University of Windsor. Cheran teaches in the areas of migration, national and ethnic conflicts, transnationalism, diaspora studies and globalization. The recipient of several research awards, his current research focuses on the role of peace builders and alternate forms of governance by nations without states in Myanmar, Indonesia, Nepal and Sri Lanka

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Co-Director, Center for Palestine Studies Center at Columbia University and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College. Her work straddles the disciplines of anthropology and history of science. Concerned most generally with the relationships among scientific practices, social imaginaries and political regimes, she has examined the work of specific historical sciences within the context of their own historical and disciplinary conditions of possibility. 

Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh is Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Cultural and Arab Studies at Birzeit University. His work focuses on cultural representations and the politics of Palestinian identity, in addition to his works on Arab poetry, art criticism, and translation. As a Fulbright Scholar, he is spending the 2015-1016 academic year at the Center for Palatine Studies at Columbia University

Angana P. Chatterji is Co-chair, Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Project at the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist, her work focuses on political conflict; gender, power, violence; nationalism, minoritization, racialization; religion in the public sphere; and reparatory justice