Rashid Khalidi will deliver the Fall 2025 Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture titled “This is Not War.”
More details to come.

Advance registration is mandatory for this event, and each person must have their own registration and email address. Registration doesn't guarantee a seat, and we suggest you arrive early to guarantee your spot.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He received a BA from Yale University in 1970 and a DPhil from Oxford University in 1974, and has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago. He was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and was co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993.

Lisa Anderson (moderator) is the Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor Emerita of International Relations at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Dr. Anderson served as Provost and then President of the American University in Cairo between 2008 and 2016. She is Dean Emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she led the school from 1997-2007. She was on the faculty of Columbia since 1986; she also taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and in the Government and Social Studies departments at Harvard University. She is a trustee of the Aga Khan University and member emerita of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch; she also served as President of the Middle East Studies Association and as Chair of the Board of the Social Science Research Council.

The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture is given in honor of the public intellectual and literary critic, Edward W. Said, who taught in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia from 1963 until 2003. University Professor Said was perhaps best known for his books Orientalism, published in 1978, and Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993, both of which made major contributions to the field of cultural and postcolonial studies. The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture, organized by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, pays tribute to University Professor Said by bringing to Columbia speakers who embody his beliefs and the legacy of his work.

This forum will bring together Palestinian thinkers who confront the crisis of continuity facing our history today, through their diverse scholarly and artistic practices. The speakers each develop processes that collect scattered archives but also return displaced, destroyed, or kidnapped documents to their social and political milieu. These are practices steeped in refusal and sumud, necessary to build linkages between the destroyed past, the harrowing present, and the possibility of knowledge sovereignty and a liberated future. 


PANELISTS
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.

Alia Al-Sabi is a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn, New York. Currently she is a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies department at NYU, where she researches theories of movement and subversion within logics of surveillance and confinement. Her dissertation studies a prisoners’ archive located in various parts of the West Bank and records the writing and annotative practices of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement in the 70s and 80s.

Lama Suleiman is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She is physically based in New York, but in spirit she is mostly in Palestine where she is always sensorially embedded. Lama’s work currently seeks to explore the relationship between water and the desert, and the modes of existence emerging from the space between them.

Adam HajYahia is a scholar, writer, and curator. His work examines the relations between psychic desire and capital, labor organizing and militant histories, anticolonial and colonial subjectivities, and aesthetics. He is currently Associate Curator at the Center for Human Rights & the Arts, Bard College.

DISCUSSANT
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 Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Abu El-Haj's first two books, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002 and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012), focused on the historical sciences of archaeology and genetic history. Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-9/11 America (2022) 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.

MODERATOR
Mahdi Sabbagh is an architectural scholar and urbanist. He co-curates the Palestine Festival of Literature and serves as Editor at Large for the Avery Review. He is the editor of Their Borders, Our World (Haymarket Press, 2024) and was a 2023 Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. His work appears in the Journal of Public Culture, Jerusalem Quarterly, The Architectural Review, Curbed, Architecture of the Territory (Kaph Books, 2022), Open Gaza (AUC Press, 2021), and other publications. Mahdi is a Doctoral Candidate at Columbia University and holds a Masters in Architecture from Yale.

This event is co-presented by the Center for Palestine Studies, the Palestine Festival of Literature and Performance Space New York.