Two New Books on Gaza
A panel discussion with the authors
Chair: A. Dirk Moses
Panelists: Didier Fassin, Enzo Traverso, Nadia Abu El-Haj, and Diana Greenwald
Wednesday, 5 March, 3.30-5.00pm
The City College of New York
Shepard Hall, Room 107
160 Convent Avenue, New York, 10031 (entrance by 140th Street)
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, DC. She is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine, the question of race and genomics today, and post-9/11 American militarism. Abu El-Haj has published three books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012), and Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-911 America (Verso, 2022).
Didier Fassin is James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, and Professor at the Collège de France, Chair Moral Questions and Social Issues. He is an anthropologist and a sociologist. Initially trained as a physician, he practiced internal medicine and taught public health at the University Hospital of La Pitié Salpétrière, before turning to the social sciences. He was the founding director of IRIS, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences. In 2009, he was appointed at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2019, he was elected to the Annual Chair in Public Health at the Collège de France, where his inaugural Lecture was titled “The Inequality of Lives.” In 2022, he was elected at the Collège de France on his current permanent chair, delivering an inaugural lecture titled “The Social Sciences in a Time of Crisis.” A member of the Academia Europea and the American Philosophical Society, he received the Gold Medal for anthropology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Huxley Memorial Memorial Medal of the British Royal Anthropological Institute. He has authored twenty books, which were translated in ten languages and several of which were granted awards, and edited twenty-seven collective volumes. He occasionally writes for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Guardian, Le Monde, Liberation, and is a regular contributor to Alternatives Économiques.
Diana Greenwald is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York, (CUNY), where she researches the politics of the Middle East, nationalism, conflict, and state-building. Her book, Mayors in the Middle: Indirect Rule and Local Government in Occupied Palestine (Columbia University Press, 2024), examines Palestinian local politics under Israeli occupation. Diana’s research has been published in PS: Political Science & Politics, Middle East Law and Governance, and Civil Wars. Her writing has also appeared in The National Interest, The Washington Post's Monkey Cage, +972 Magazine, and Foreign Policy.
A. Dirk Moses is the Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York, (CUNY). He is the author and editor of publications on genocide, including The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression(Cambridge University Press, 2021). Recent anthologies include The Holocaust Museum and Human Rights: Transnational Perspectives on Contemporary Memorials (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), and The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Victims Perpetrators Justice and the Question of Genocide (Routledge, 2024). He edits the Journal of Genocide Research, which is hosting a forum on Gaza and Genocide Studies. www.dirkmoses.com.
Enzo Traverso is Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intellectual history and the political ideas of modern and contemporary Europe. He was born in Italy, studied history at the University of Genoa and received his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 1989. Before coming to Cornell in 2013, he taught political science for twenty years in France. He has been a visiting professor in several European and Latin American universities. His books include Gaza Faces History (Other Press, 2024); Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography (Columbia University Press, 2022); Revolutions: An Intellectual History (Verso, 2021); Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (Columbia University Press, 2017); Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945 (Verso, 2016).
Registration information
ID required. Non-CUNY guests should email Jenifer Roman jroman@ccny.cuny.edu to be placed on the guest list for entry to Shepard Hall.
