Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh
CPS Visiting Scholar
Fall 2015, Spring 2016
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 Palestine Studies at Columbia University working on his project entitled, The Palestinian Living Cemetery. Al-Shaikh earned his Ph.D. in Middle East and Arab Studies at the University of Utah, after which he conducted his postdoctoral research in cultural mobility in near-eastern cultures at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Since 2005, he has been a fellow at both Muwatin-The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, and the Institute of Palestine Studies. He is the author of: Sharon's Golden Heart: A Mythical Trial (2007), Palestinian Textbooks: Issues of Identity and Citizenship (2008) and The Biography of Gabi Baramki and His Odyssey at Birzeit University 1929-2012 (2015). He translated Hussein Barghouthi's autobiography al-Daw' al-Azraq (The Blue Light) into English (2003), and Oz Shelach's Picnic Grounds (2010) into Arabic. He has published three collections of poetry: Ash Wheels (1998), City Remnants (2003), and Departing Narratives (2012). His forthcoming book is titled: The Columbus Syndrome and the Veiling of Palestine: Politics of Toponymy of the Palestinian Landscape 1856-2015 (2016).
