APPLY | Ibrahim Abu-Lughod 2023 Fellowship Competition

The Center for Palestine Studies is pleased to announce that the competition for the 2023-2024 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Award is open!

Applications are due on February 15, 2023.

The Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Award is a year-long fellowship that recognizes and fosters innovative and ground-breaking scholarship on issues related to Palestine and Palestinians. The award will support a scholar working on a book project in any field of the humanities or social sciences who will spend the academic year at Columbia University in New York, pursuing their research and writing, contributing to curricular matters, and participating in the intellectual life of the Center for Palestine Studies.

Established in 2010, the IAL Award was made possible through the generosity of the late Abdel Mohsin Al-Qattan in honor of his friend, the Palestinian scholar and intellectual, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929-2001). Their close friendship began in the aftermath of the Nakba of 1948 and evolved into a shared commitment to justice for Palestinians to be realized through support for excellence in higher education and scholarship. Major support for the IAL Award comes from the A.M. Qattan Foundation.

For complete information about eligibility and application requirements, visit the IAL section of the Center's website.

READ | Washington Post Review of Nadia Abu El-Haj's "Combat Trauma"

Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war?
In ‘Combat Trauma,’ Nadia Abu El-Haj examines the history and politics of PTSD

By Lyle Jeremy Rubin
December 13, 2022

“El-Haj is an academic, and her book amounts to a brave act of scholarship. But at its best moments, ‘Combat Trauma’ also musters a rhetorical force reminiscent of past public intellectuals like Hannah Arendt. Indeed, on multiple occasions El-Haj cites Arendt, who likewise pushed readers to think critically about war and empire. There is much in El-Haj’s argument that can be questioned, beginning with whether her anti-imperialist approach to healing could be put to work within the halls of power, an idea bound to trip over its own paradoxical preconditions. Likewise, it’s not entirely clear how her approach applies to veterans who don’t share her politics or her commitment to transformative activism. But as a prod for a citizenry whose unspoken politics is one of imperial amnesia or self-congratulation, El-Haj’s contribution couldn’t be more welcome. And for a nation that persists in seeing itself as the victim to justify its status as avenging victimizer, this book may be a necessary one.”

Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-9/11 America is available now from Verso.

ATTEND | The Fisheries of the Southern Mediterranean From Morocco to Turkey, 1950-2020

The Fisheries of the Southern Mediterranean From Morocco to Turkey, 1950-2020 with Daniel Pauly

14 DEC 2022
12:00 PM NEW YORK
7:00 PM JERUSALEM
ONLINE

Join the Bisan Center, Scientists for Palestine and the Center for Palestine Studies for the next talk in the Bisan Lecture Series!

The Mediterranean and its fisheries have been studied for millennia, but much of the published information pertains to its Northern coast, from Spain to Greece, i.e., to countries of the European Union. This account presents the ‘catch reconstructions’ and information gathered in the process of detailed examinations of the fisheries along the Southern coast of the Mediterranean by country, from Morocco in the West to Turkey in the east, which are often ignored in Mediterranean studies. Some of the challenges facing fisheries and fisheries research in the countries of the Southern Mediterranean will be presented.

Daniel Pauly is University of British Columbia Killam Professor

SUBMIT | Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem

Jerusalem Quarterly Announces the 2023 Cycle of the Ibrahim Dakkak Award

The Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem is an annual award launched by the Jerusalem Quarterly in 2017 to honor the memory and work of Ibrahim Dakkak (1929–2016), Jerusalem architect, activist, political leader, and former chairman of the Advisory Board of the Jerusalem Quarterly.

It is awarded to an outstanding submission (in English or Arabic) that addresses either contemporary or historical issues relating to Jerusalem. A committee selected by the Jerusalem Quarterly determines the winning essay. The author will be awarded a prize of U.S. $1,000, and the essay will be published in the Jerusalem Quarterly.

Essays submitted or nominated for consideration should be based on original research and must not have been previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere. Essays should be 4,000 to 5,000 words in length (including endnotes), preceded by an abstract of no more than 200 words, and up to 10 keywords.

If the submitted or nominated essay is in Arabic, the abstract and keywords should be in English.

Preference will be given to emerging/early career researchers and students.

Any images should be submitted as separate files with a resolution of 600 dpi minimum, if possible. Submitted images must have copyright clearance from owners, and have captions that are clear and accurate.

Please submit or nominate essays and a short bio (including current or previous affiliation with a recognized university, research institution, or non-governmental organization that conducts research) via email to jq@palestine-studies.org, mentioning the Award. In the case of nomination, please provide a contact address for the nominated author.

The deadline for submissions is 15 January of each year.

ATTEND | Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine Conference

DATE
Monday, October 31, 2022 - 9:00am - Wednesday, November 2, 2022 - 6:00pm

LOCATION
Birzeit, Online

The Institute for Palestine Studies, in partnership with several research centers in the region, Europe and North America are organizing a conference titled “Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine”, 31 October – 2 November 2022. 

The British Mandate (1922-1948) represents over a quarter-century in the modern history of Palestine during which the groundwork was laid for the usurpation of Palestinian political rights and the establishment of a Zionist state. It was also a period of vibrant Palestinian mobilization, which was already in motion during the late Ottoman era, and through the mandate, reaching its height during the rebellion of 1936-1939—across cities and the countryside—to respond to newly emerging realities.

It is this vibrancy that the conference seeks to explore. Beyond treating the Mandate as a legal and political system, the conference revisits the social, legal, cultural, economic, and political history of Palestine and Palestinians during the Mandate period. It brings together scholars from Chile to Palestine and beyond, working on a wide array of disciplines and topics.

The conference will convene in Arabic and English, with simultaneous interpretation available.

For more info, visit the Institute for Palestine Studies website, here.

SPEAKERS

Hana Sleiman, Beshara B. Doumani, Khaled Farraj, Nazmi Jubeh, Maher Charif, Gabriel Polley, Magdalena Pycinska, Hussein Ayaseh, Lorenzo Kamel, Toufic Haddad, Hamdan Taha, Sarah Irving, Beverley Butler, Salim Tamari, Rana Anani, Sarah Dweik, Dennis Sobeh, Hadeel Karkar, Hamed Salem, Brian Boyd, Mahmoud Hawari, Munir Fakher Eldin, Adel Manna, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, Chris Sandal-Wilson, Cynthia Kreichati, Islah Jad, Rasha Salameh, Areej Abou Harb, Dia Barghouti, Refqa Abu-Remaileh, Ibrahim Abdou, Musa Sroor, Charles W. Anderson, Mai Taha, Tareq Radi, Sana Hammoudi, Ghada al-Madbouh, Jehad Alshwaikh, Bassam Abun-Nadi, Nadi Abusaada, Nisa Ari, Issam Nassar, Samar al-Saleh, Bret Windhauser, Marisa Gabrielle Natale, Joni Aasi, Laura Robson, Ghassan Khatib, Canan Özcan Eliaçık, Ricardo Marzuca, Sreemati Mitter, Riyad Musa, Lana Judeh, Leena Dallasheh, Falestin Nail, iLaila Parsons, Julio Moreno Cirujano, Majdi al-Malki, Pietro Stefanini, Martin Bunton, Rachel Mairs, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Terry Regier, Maha Samman, Jacob Norris, Sharri Plonski, Nivi Manchanda, Dalal Iriqat, Jens Hanssen, Hanna Al Taher, Sarah el-Bulbeisi, Anna-E. Younes, Sanabel Abdelrahman, Rana Barakat, Ilana Feldman, Amal Bishara, Alejandro Paz, Sherene Seikaly

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The conference is jointly sponsored by the following institutions: Birzeit University; Council for British Research in the Levant; New Directions in Palestine Studies, Brown University; Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University; Hearing Palestine, University of Toronto; European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter; Centre for Palestine Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

ATTEND | Celebrating Recent Work by Nadia Abu El-Haj

17 November 2022
6:15pm
Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room
contact: sofheyman@columbia.edu

Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-9/11 America
by Nadia Abu El-Haj

Americans have long been asked to support the troops and care for veterans’ psychological wounds. Who, though, does this injunction serve?

As acclaimed scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj argues here, in the American public’s imagination, the traumatized soldier stands in for destructive wars abroad, with decisive ramifications in the post-9/11 era. Across the political spectrum the language of soldier trauma is used to discuss American warfare, producing a narrative in which traumatized soldiers are the only acknowledged casualties of war, while those killed by American firepower are largely sidelined and forgotten.

In this wide-ranging and fascinating study of the meshing of medicine, science, and politics, Abu El-Haj explores the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder and the history of its medical diagnosis. While antiwar Vietnam War veterans sought to address their psychological pain even as they maintained full awareness of their guilt and responsibility for perpetrating atrocities on the killing fields of Vietnam, by the 1980s, a peculiar convergence of feminist activism against sexual violence and Reagan’s right-wing “war on crime” transformed the idea of PTSD into a condition of victimhood. In so doing, the meaning of Vietnam veterans’ trauma would also shift, moving away from a political space of reckoning with guilt and complicity to one that cast them as blameless victims of a hostile public upon their return home. This is how, in the post-9/11 era of the Wars on Terror, the injunction to "support our troops," came to both sustain US militarism and also shields American civilians from the reality of wars fought ostensibly in their name.

In this compelling and crucial account, Nadia Abu El-Haj challenges us to think anew about the devastations of the post-9/11 era.

This event will be in person at the Heyman Center and live-streamed online. Please register for both in-person and virtual attendance via the link.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

About the Author

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the 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.

About the Speakers

Thomas W. Dodman is an Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University. His first book, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion explores how people once died of nostalgia in order to tell a larger story about social transformation and alienation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He also co-edits the French journal Sensibilités: histoire, critique & sciences sociales, and serves on the editorial board of Critical Historical Studies.

Catherine Fennell’s work examines the cultural transformation of the American welfare state and the effects of this transformation on the politics of citizenship, belonging and race within redeveloping cities. Through her ethnographic research, she has focused on how large-scale changes in the urban built environment shape the ways in which urbanites come to understand social difference, and practice new forms of social care, concern and intimacy.

Miriam Ticktin is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She came from the New School for Social Research, where she was Chair of Anthropology from 2016-2018, Co-Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility [newschool.edu] between 2013-2016 and Director of Gender Studies from 2012-2013. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Miriam also was a Fellow in the Society of Fellows (2002-2004).

READ | New Article by Nathaniel George, IAL Fellow 2020-21

“‘Our 1789’: The Transitional Program of the Lebanese National Movement and the Abolition of Sectarianism, 1975–77”

ABSTRACT Were the events of 1975–77 in Lebanon, commonly thought of today as an internecine sectarian war between Christians and Muslims, more comparable to the furies of revolution and counterrevolution? This article reframes the Lebanese National Movement's (LNM) “Transitional Program” as a revolutionary, anti-colonial, and radical republican challenge that sought to implement a new constitutional order based on popular sovereignty. Internally, it severed the link between sectarian affiliation and political representation that was the hallmark of the Lebanese regime. Externally, the program announced a commitment to popular struggle against imperially sustained settler colonialism in Palestine while calling into question the authoritarian practices of most regional regimes. Drawing from periodicals, memoirs, diplomatic sources, and interviews, this article considers the efforts of the LNM-PLO alliance to push the Transitional Program in the political sphere and on the battlefield. In turn, it demonstrates how the United States, Syria, Israel, and Lebanese counterrevolutionaries worked in concert to ensure that the sectarian regime would be preserved at the moment of its greatest challenge. Against a historiography that either dismisses the venture as predestined to fail or considers the period only within the shackles of post-defeat melancholia, it reevaluates the history of one of the most explicit emancipatory challenges to the Arab order.

Nathaniel George is Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He was previously an Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies and holds a PhD in History from Rice University.

CITATION Nathaniel George; “Our 1789”: The Transitional Program of the Lebanese National Movement and the Abolition of Sectarianism, 1975–77. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 2022; 42 (2): 470–488. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-9987957

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IMAGE CREDIT “Against Imperialism and Zionism.” Lebanese National Movement, 1977. Clockwise from top left: Kamal Junblat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Che Guevara, nineteenth-century Mount Lebanese peasant rebel Tanyus Shahin, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba. Source: SignsOfConflict.com and the PSP Archives.

ATTEND | Insaniyyat Fall 2022 Talks: Crossing a Line w Amahl Bishara + Rhoda Kanaaneh

Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression

Anthropologist Amahl Bishara in Conversation with Anthropologist Rhoda Kanaaneh

Wednesday, October 19th, at 12pm New York / 7PM Jerusalem

Palestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Through ethnography in her new book (Stanford, 2022), Bishara enters these distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and considers how Palestinians are differently impacted by dispossession, settler colonialism, and militarism.

For more info about this event and other talks this semester, visit Insaniyyat’s website.

Amahl Bishara is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Tufts University.

Rhoda Kanaaneh, an anthropologist and author of several books and articles in Palestinian anthropology, has taught anthropology and gender and sexuality studies at a number of universities, including NYU, Columbia University and most recently Fordham University.