APPLY | PARC 2027–2028 Fellowships

2027–2028 PARC Fellowships for U.S. Scholars Conducting Research on Palestine
The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) announces its 27th PARC U.S. research fellowship competition for research that will contribute to Palestinian Studies. Applicants must be doctoral students or scholars who have earned their PhD and must be U.S. citizens. Fellowship awards up to a maximum of $10,000. Research must take place in Palestine, Israel, Jordan, or Lebanon. Applications are due January 18, 2027.

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2027-2028 PARC Fellowships for Palestinian Scholars Conducting Humanities and Social Science Field-Based Research on Palestine
The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) announces its 28th annual Palestinian research fellowship competition for research in the humanities and social sciences that will contribute to Palestinian Studies. Applicants must be Palestinian doctoral students or Palestinian scholars who have earned their PhD. Palestinians may apply regardless of their country of residence or ID. Fellowship awards are up to a maximum of $6,000. Research must take place in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, or Lebanon. Applications are due December 5, 2026.

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2027-2028 PARC Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarships for Palestinian Women Pursuing PhDs
The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) announces its 5th competition for PARC Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarships for Palestinian women pursuing PhDs in the humanities and social sciences. Qualified applicants should have an acceptance to, or already be enrolled in, a doctoral program in the humanities or social sciences at an accredited university anywhere in the world. Applicants who are applying to PhD programs and are currently in Gaza are also eligible for this competition. Scholarship awards for the academic year 2027-2028 are from $5,000 up to a maximum of $25,000. Scholarships may be used for any expenses related to the pursuit of the degree. Interested applicants should submit a pre-proposal due on October 26, 2026. Approved applicants will be invited to submit a more detailed final application. The deadline for final applications is January 25, 2027.

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APPLY | "Teaching Palestine in the Age of Precarity," MESA Annual Meeting Workshop, 11/21/26

"Teaching Palestine in the Age of Precarity"
Precarity Committee Workshop, MESA Annual Meeting
Saturday, November 21, 2026, 10:30 AM – 3:00 PM

The workshop will include 16 precarious scholars who engage with Palestine through their teaching, writing, and political expression such as campus organizing. It will be led by specialists in Palestine studies in two separate sessions. The morning session will focus on teaching Palestine and the Middle East and North Africa, focusing on practical tools for teaching “controversial” texts and topics in the classroom. The afternoon session will center on writing about Palestine for both scholarly audiences and popular non-specialist audiences, focusing on addressing both editorial censorship and the tendency towards self-censorship. In both sessions, participants will explore strategies to push back against the “Palestine exception” and the larger repression of political expression. 

Participants will submit a draft syllabus or detailed course description and an abstract or pitch for a piece of writing in advance for discussion in the breakout groups. 

The workshop will be closed to the 16 precarious scholars and presenters; it will not be recorded. 

Applications are due September 24, 2026.

WELCOME | Samee Sulaiman is Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow in Palestine Studies

Samee Sulaiman is an anthropologist whose research and teaching focus on disability, political violence, mobility, and social movements in Lebanon and Palestine. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Brown University in 2023 and was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Palestine Studies at Yale University’s Council on Middle East Studies. His research draws on ethnographic work with Lebanese and Palestinian disability activists and organizations, examining disability politics, citizenship and non-citizenship, war, and crisis in Lebanon. His current work focuses on disability and mass disablement in Palestine, particularly in Gaza, and explores the relationship between disability justice, decolonization, reconstruction, and liberation. He is currently the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies. Learn more about his work here.

EXPLORE | The Palestinian Folk Music Archive

The Palestinian Folk Music Archive is a digital platform established by Serena Rasoul designed to preserve, connect, and revitalize Palestinian folk songs before they disappear. Drawing from an existing collection of field recordings, the project will combine these materials with a crowdsourcing site where Palestinians everywhere can upload recordings of their parents and grandparents singing the heritage songs of their childhoods. Each contribution transforms private memory into a shared archive–an act of remembrance, resistance, and continuity.

Serena Rasoul is an ethnomusicologist, artist, and cultural advocate whose work explores the relationship between sound and continuity. She is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University, where her research engages Palestinian folklore and oral traditions as active, intergenerational knowledge systems conveying the connection between land, community, and social life. Serena’s work bridges scholarship and creative practice, using community-based projects that refuse erasure and amplify lived experience. She has held positions as Resident Fellow at Harvard Divinity School and Community Engagement Specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art.

APPLY | BASAR Art Residency

Open Call 2027

The Palestinian Museum and the Sukhtian Foundation launch BASAR, a fully funded, two- to three-month art residency for Palestinian artists, curators, arts educators, and cultural practitioners in the diaspora. Applications are now open for the inaugural edition, with residencies beginning between January and June 2027.

BASAR supports research-led artistic and cultural work that explores Palestinian cultural narratives, histories, memory, and everyday life and, through artistic production and public engagement, imagines Palestinian futurities. Residents are provided with time, resources, and access to the Museum’s archives, exhibitions, collections, and cultural networks in Palestine. The residency also opens avenues for exchange and collaboration with local artists and cultural practitioners, and for conversations about artistic practices and questions of cultural work in Palestine.

The first BASAR residencies will begin between January and June 2027, with the exact dates and duration of each residency agreed with the selected resident.

•  Location: The Palestinian Museum, Birzeit
•  Duration: 2–3 months
•  Residencies begin: January–June 2027
•  Application deadline: 30 November 2026
•  Applicants notified: January–February 2027
•  Application and working languages: Arabic or English

CONGRATS | Lila Abu-Lughod Named International Fellow of the British Academy

92 distinguished scholars have been elected to the British Academy’s Fellowship this year in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the humanities and social sciences. Among them is Center for Palestine Studies faculty member, Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Department of Anthropology.

ATTEND | Visualizing Gaza: Healing, Recovery, and Restoration at Brown University, 04/16/26

Visualizing Gaza: Healing, Recovery, and Restoration
Center for Middle East Studies, Brown University

Watson School of International and Public Affairs, 111 Thayer Street

This event discusses the possibilities of visualizing Gaza’s healing, recovery and rebuilding and the restoration of its demolished heritage. The talk will follow the “Phoenix of Gaza XR” exhibit and explore the use of media, urban planning, digital archiving, and virtual reality in Gaza before and during the war. In doing so, it will also examine how digitization, urban planning, visualization and virtual reality technologies can be applied toward repair and reconstruction to advance restorative justice and revitalization.

SPEAKERS
Ahlam Muhtaseb is a professor of media studies at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) and a senior data justice fellow with Princeton’s Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She has an M.A. in Journalism and a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the recipient of the 2024 Women Support Organization’s Distinguished Woman of the Year award and the 2024 Activism and Social Justice Scholarly Influence Award by the National Communication Association’s (NCA’s) Activism and Social Justice Division. She is also the recipient of the 2020 CSUSB Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creative Activities Award and the 2019-20 Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Faculty Mentor Awardees. In 2019, she won the Rebuilding Alliance “Story Teller” Award. Her research interests include digital communication, digital resistance, decolonization, social justice and diasporic communities. She is the co-founder and faculty director of the Gaza xReal project: The Phoenix of Gaza.

Mazen Iwaisi is currently an Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow Academic Year 2025-26 at Columbia University. He earned his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast, examining the concept of Archaeolopolitics in the Making of the Palestinian National Spatial Plan, with funding from the Palestinian American Research Center and Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland. Mazen is currently working with Brian Boyd, Jamal Barghouth and other scholars on the Archaeology of the Nakba project “From Memory to Place.”

Naim Abu Raddi is currently a Data Justice Fellow at Princeton University. He is also pursuing a PhD in media studies and teaching in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Phoenix of Gaza XR, a nationally and internationally recognized immersive media project that documents life in Gaza, highlighting its history, culture, and resilience.

Orwa Switat is a postdoctoral research associate in Palestinian studies at the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University. Switat is an urban planning scholar with degrees in philosophy, political science, and urban planning. He focuses on the status of groups in planning theory and practice. He has been a Religion and Public Life Fellow in Conflict and Peace at Harvard Divinity School and a visiting scholar in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. In his research, he integrates digitization and visualization with discourse and planning analysis to uncover hidden histories, restore lost heritages, spatialize oral histories, visualize counter-hegemonic narratives, and develop innovative restorative planning approaches.

ATTEND | The Phoenix of Gaza at Hunter College, 04/15-16/26

For two days, Hunter College is hosting the Pheonix of Gaza. Join us to partake in a one-of-a-kind experience that uses thousands of images and 360° video footage shot in 2022 to immerse viewers into life in Gaza – from wedding celebrations to street life, to cultural monuments that now lie in ruins. 

Sign up for a 30 minute slot to experience The Virtual Reality Phoenix of Gaza Exhibit using this link.

Enter Gaza through the eyes of its people. At Hunter's Blackbox Theater we are hosting a Virtual Reality project by Dr.Ahlam Muhtaseb and researchers at the x-Real Lab of California State University San Bernardino through a VR headset and tons of footage, offers an immersive view of Gaza as documented by its artists and journalists in 2022. Read more about the project here.

In addition to the Phoenix of Gaza, there are two evenings of programming with dinner to celebrate “Gaza the dignified and resilient” (غزة العزة والصمود) and the Palestinians who insist on dignity, resilience, and beauty as they resist its erasure.

April 15, Panel 1: Archiving Against Erasure
6:00pm-8:00pm 
Ahlam Muhtaseb (keynote)
Sireen Sawalha, Nasser Abou-Rahme, and Mazen Iwaisi

April 16, Panel 2: Life Making as Resistance
6:00pm-8:00pm
Musical event with Zafir Tawil
Hadeel Assali, Rana Barakat, and Mohammed Mhawish
RSVP required, you can rsvp for the panels and dinner here.

All events will be held at the Black Box Theater: Hunter North 543