CONGRATS | Gil Hochberg Receives 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award

CPS congratulates faculty member Gil Hochberg for receiving a 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

She was chosen for her René Wellek Prize-winning monograph, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future, and her leadership in fostering constructive student and faculty conversations on Israel and Gaza as chair of the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

Gil Hochberg is the Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies - Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and a member of the Center for Palestine Studies Faculty Collective.

For more info, click here.

ATTEND | Virtual Gaza: Notes on Martial Design on 03/14/24

Middle Eastern Studies Program, Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College Present

Virtual Gaza: Notes on Martial Design
Thursday, March 14, 2024

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Bard College
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Ali Musleh, Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies

Siege warfare and occupation as conducted by the Israeli state are in permanent beta phase. AI-powered systems of targeting, remote and robotic weaponry, terraforming munitions, algorithmic governance, mass shock-and-awe assaults—these, among other forms of violence, are all treated as tests in an endless iterative loop. With each incursion into Palestinian lifeworlds, new terrains of intervention are opened up to the power and forces of design, from the nervous system of the occupied to the subterranean spaces of armed insurgency. With a focus on Gaza since the turn of the 21st Century, this talk explores design as a spirit of approach to settler-colonial warfare. It shows how conceptualizing design as war can offer new insights into settler colonialism’s virtual potential to generate new and emergent forms of horror. Imprisoned within Israel’s iterative design abyss, a virtual Gaza is formed and reformed without telos or end, one where the designers of armed violence give themselves up to an open-ended process of becoming with weapons that implicates the entirety of settler society.

Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies. He is also associate researcher at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UH-M) Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies. In 2022, he received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at UHM, where he taught global politics and political design and futuristics.

For more info, click here.

CALL | SOAS Centre for Palestine Studies 10th Annual Graduate Research Seminar Call for Papers

SOAS Centre for Palestine Studies 10th Annual Graduate Research Seminar Call for Papers

Recognizing the urgency of the study of Palestine amidst the ongoing genocide—including the destruction of the Palestinian educational sector and a widespread campaign to suppress solidarity with Palestine—the Centre for Palestine Studies announces the call forpapers for its 10th annual graduate research seminar, to be held on 6 June 2024 in hybrid format, at SOAS, University of London and online.
 
This research seminar provides a critical platform for PhD students and postdoctoral scholars working on Palestine or Palestine-related issues to present their projects, receive feedback, and engage others within a supportive environment. We welcome a broad range of topics, aiming at an interdisciplinary dialogue across Palestine Studies.

Panels will be organised around themes that emerge from the research submissions and will be assigned a discussant to respond. If you are interested in participating, please make a submission via the online form by 14 April 2024. 
 
A complete application will include a proposed title, an abstract of maximum 200 words, along with a brief bio. In your submission, please specify whether you plan to participate in-person or online.

For more info, click here. 
To submit a proposal, click here.

READ | "Abu Jubran and Jabal ʿAmil Between the Palestinian and Iranian Revolutions" by Nathaniel George

Nathaniel George has a chapter titled, “Abu Jubran and Jabal ʿAmil Between the Palestinian and Iranian Revolutions,” in the new volume The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine, and Beyond, edited by Sune Haugbolle and Rasmus Elling (London: Oneworld Academic, 2024).

The chapter explores the history and development of the Lebanese-Palestinian resistance in south Lebanon, with a focus on the under-examined period of the late 1970s. It draws on microhistorical approaches to challenge a clear-cut declension narrative of the Lebanese National Movement-Palestine Liberation Organization (LNM-PLO) alliance by revisiting a largely repressed history of victory and contestation. It examines the trajectory of the Lebanese left primarily through a series of oral history interviews I conducted in rural south Lebanon with a longtime, influential, southern Lebanese communist. It also reflects upon on the transition between national and Islamic modes of anticolonial resistance.

Nathaniel George is Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. He was the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies in academic year 2020-2021.