WATCH | Recording of 'Writing for Radio'

A conversation with two celebrated Palestinian writers, Selma Dabbagh and Ahmed Masoud, about what it means to write for radio and their experiences writing in, about, and outside of Palestine. Opening remarks by Brinkley Messick. Q&A session moderated by A. George Bajalia.

This event on 08 July 2021 opened the Center’s NO PLACE | LA MAKAN | لا مكان program, which will commission, develop, produce, and distribute four new radio plays by Palestinian playwrights in 2021-2022. A series of ancillary events will build skills in writing and producing within the audio medium and be open to the public.

For more information about the NO PLACE program and the speakers in this event, click here.

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NO PLACE | LA MAKAN | لا مكان is a project of the Center for Palestine Studies produced in partnership with the A. M. Qattan Foundation, with support from Taawon, The Tides Foundation, and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

WATCH | Recording of 'The Israeli Academy and the Palestinian Struggle'

Missed 'The Israeli Academy and the Palestinian Struggle' on 23 June 2021 ? You can now watch the event recording on the Center’s YouTube Channel.

The event was organized by Academia for Equality, and co-sponsored by The Center for Palestine Studies, The Middle East Institute at Columbia University, Association of Black Anthropologists, Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, Scientists For Palestine, British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies, San Francisco State University, Department of Anthropology, University of the Western Cape (South Africa), and NYU Gallatin Human Rights Initiative.

LISTEN | Book Club w/ Jeffrey Sachs Ep. 3 Interview w/ Rashid Khalidi

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian Rashid Khalidi as they discuss Khalidi's book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 and the long history of disenfranchisement against the Palestinian people.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts / Spotify

WATCH | Recording of 'Said's Palestine'

“Said’s Palestine” (Jun 1, 2021) engaged in an analysis and discussion of contemporary conditions in Palestine through the terms of analysis Edward Said’s corpus of work offers us. The discussion ranged over what Said’s terms enable in analysis and comprehension of the immediate and longer term causes, their limits in accounting for these conditions, and ways to think about possible futures.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College and Columbia University
Esmat Elhalaby, UC Davis
Saree Makdisi, UC Los Angeles
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Hebrew University
Judith Butler, UC Berkeley

Visit The University of California Humanities Research Institute’s website for additional resources mentioned during the panel.

WATCH | Deadly Drama: Empire & the Colonial Gaze, from Palestine to India & Beyond

Join Pangea World Theater on 10 June 2021 for an interdisciplinary conversation about history, theater and cultural resistance, as we discuss the urgent work of decolonizing knowledge and culture in the face of centuries of violence and erasure. This conversation will be streamed on Facebook live and will feature Rashid Khalidi, Meena Natarajan, and Ismail Khalidi.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at the University of Columbia. He is author of eight books on the history of the Middle East, most recently, the New York Times Best-Selling The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917- 2017. His other books include Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East and Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. He is editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, as well as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993.

Ismail Khalidi is a playwright, director and contributor to the Center for Palestine Studies’ theater program CPS Stage. plays include Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater ‘05), Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre ‘10), Foot (Teatro Amal ‘16), Sabra Falling (Pangea ‘17), and Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre ‘18). He also co-adapted two novels for the stagel Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre ‘18) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville ‘19). Khalidi’s work has been included in numerous anthologies and he co-edited Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG ‘15). His writing has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Mizna, Guernica, Al Jazeera, The Dramatist, and ReMezcla. Khalidi holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Meena Natarajan is a playwright and director and the Executive and Artistic Director of Pangea World Theater, a progressive, international ensemble space that creates at the intersection of art, equity and social justice. She has led the theater’s growth since it’s founding in 1995. Meena has co-curated and designed many of Pangea World Theater’s professional and community based programs. She has written at least ten full-length works for Pangea, ranging from adaptations of poetry and mythology to original works dealing with war, spirituality, personal and collective memory. Meena leads ensemble-based processes in Pangea that lead to works produced for the stage. She has also directed and dramaturged several original theater and performance art pieces. She is currently on the board of the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists and is a National Theater Project Advisor at New England Foundation for the Arts. She was on the Advisory Committee of the Community Arts Network, was on the founding board of the Network of Ensemble Theaters and was the president of Women’s Playwrights International between 2000-2003. She has been awarded grants from the Theatre Communications Group, Playwrights Center and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She was recently awarded the Visionary Award for mid-career leaders from the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits.

ATTEND | Palestine from Above – Surveillance, Cartography, Control

3 JUNE 2021
6pm LONDON

Join The Mosaic Rooms for the third part of the symposium When I see the future… in the public programme of Heba Y. Amin‘s exhibition When I see the future, I close my eyes. 

View the event details on The Mosaic Room’s website.

Jerusalem Quarterly guest editors Yazid Anani, Salim Tamari and select contributors Ariel Caine, Zeynep Çelik and Michael Talbot share this round table discussion dedicated to aerial surveillance of Palestine. The event marks Jerusalem Quarterly‘s special issue Palestine from Above: Surveillance Cartography and Control (Spring and Summer, 2020).

Jerusalem Quarterly is the leading journal on the past, present, and future of Jerusalem. It documents the current status of the city and its predicament. It is also dedicated to publishing new lines of inquiry by emerging scholars on Palestinian society and culture.

About the speakers

Yazid Anani born 1975, Ramallah, is the Director of the Public Programme at the A. M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah. He curated and co-curated several projects including: Outside the Archive, Subcontracted nations, Zalet Lisan, The Facility, Weed Control and the 2nd- 6th editions of Cities Exhibition. More about Yazid Anani.

Ariel Caine is an artist and researcher currently living in London. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University and is a researcher at Forensic Architecture. More about Ariel Caine

Michael Talbot is Senior Lecturer in the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich. His research to date has examined Ottoman-British relations (17th-19th centuries), Ottoman maritime law and practice (18th century), and the history of late Ottoman Palestine. More about Michael Talbot.

Zeynep Çelik is distinguished professor emerita at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and adjunct professor of History at Columbia University. Her publications include Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations (1997), Camera Ottomana (2014, co-editor), and Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient (forthcoming). More about Zeynep Çelik.

Salim Tamari is IPS senior fellow and the former director of the IPS-affiliated Institute of Jerusalem Studies. He is editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and Hawliyyat al Quds. He is professor of sociology at Birzeit University and an adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. More about Salim Tamari.

Image: (Detail) Graf Zeppelin over Jerusalem, 1931. G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

ATTEND | Said's Palestine, 1 June 2021 at 12:00 PM PST

"Said's Palestine" will engage in an analysis and discussion of contemporary conditions in Palestine through the terms of analysis Edward Said's corpus of work offers us. The discussion will range over what Said's terms enable in analysis and comprehension of the immediate and longer term causes, their limits in accounting for these conditions, and how to think about possible futures.

On Tuesday, June 1 at 12:00 PM PST, University of California Humanities Research Institute will host a conversation on Said's Palestine with Nadia Abu El-Haj (Barnard College and Columbia University), Esmat Elhalaby (UC Davis), Saree Makdisi (UC Los Angeles), Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian (Hebrew University), and Judith Butler (UC Berkeley).

Please RSVP to receive a personalized link to join the Zoom webinar.

WATCH | Recording of NAKBA TODAY event with S. Seikaly, B. Abu-Manneh + N. Abu El-Haj

If you missed our conversation with Sherene Seikaly, Bashir Abu-Manneh and Nadia Abu El-Haj about recent events in the ongoing Nabka you can watch the recording now on the Center’s YouTube Channel.

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Bashir Abu-Manneh is Head of School of English and Reader in Postcolonial Literature at University of Kent. He is author of The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (2016) and Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913-1939 (2011), and is editor of After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2018).

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (2016). Seikaly is following her great-grandfather in her forthcoming book titled From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine. His trajectory from nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, senior editor and co-editor of Jadaliyya.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is the Ann Olin Whitney Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia. Abu El-Haj has published two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001) and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012). While Abu El-Haj’s two books to date have focused on historical sciences (archaeology, and genetic history), her third book, tentatively titled, Soldier Trauma, The Obligations of Citizenship, and the Forever Wars (Verso, forthcoming) examines the field of (military) psychiatry, and explores the complex ethical and political implications of shifting psychiatric and public understandings of the trauma of American soldiers.