CONGRATS | Tim Mitchell, Recipient of the Grain of Sand Award, from the American Political Science Association

CPS congratulates faculty member, Timothy Mitchell, William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, on receiving the Grain of Sand Award, a career award from the American Political Science Association, Interpretive Methodologies and Methods unit. The award honors a scholar whose contributions demonstrate creative and sustained engagement with questions of enduring political importance from an interpretive perspective.

WATCH | Palestine and the Logic of Denial w/ Saree Makdisi

On Monday, 23 October 2023, the Center for Palestine Studies and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities hosted Saree Makdisi for a talk about his recent book, Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022), and commentary on the 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel and the ongoing war on Gaza.

APPLY | 2024-2025 Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarship for Palestinian Women Pursuing PhDs

The Palestinian American Research Center announces the inauguration of The Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarship for Palestinian women pursuing PhDs in the humanities and social sciences. The Scholarship was established in honor of the late Tanya Baker-Asad, an anthropologist, a feminist, and a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause. A woman of great integrity and compassion, and with a strong sense of justice, Tanya Baker-Asad was a researcher and a teacher who remained steadfast in her commitment to improving the lives of women, particularly those living under conditions of hardship and political repression. The Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarship was established by Baker-Asad’s husband, Talal Asad. 

Qualified applicants should either be enrolled or in the process of enrolling in a doctoral program in the humanities or social sciences at an accredited university anywhere in the world. The maximum Scholarship award for academic year 2024/2025 is $25,000, while the duration of the award is for one year. The Scholarship may be used for any expenses related to the pursuit of the degree (e.g. tuition, research expenses, dissertation write-up support, living expenses). 

Information about this competition:

  • Applicants must be women of Palestinian heritage.

  • Applicants must be scholars enrolled, or in the process of enrolling in a PhD  program at an accredited university anywhere in the world. 

  • Fields of study include, but are not limited to, anthropology, sociology, economics, history, philosophy, religious studies, political science, psychology, geography, literature, languages and linguistics, archaeology, art history, media studies, and film studies.

  • The Scholarship can be used for any expenses related to the pursuit of the degree (e.g. tuition, research expenses, dissertation write-up support, living expenses).

Applications due January 8, 2024 | Awards announced April 18, 2024

For complete information, visit PARC’s website at https://www.parc-us-pal.org.

     
 The Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarship is supported by
the Tanya Baker-Asad Fund

ATTEND | Bisan Lecture Series w/ Rashid Khalidi on 10/11/23

The Latest Phase of the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
Online | 12pm New York

For over a century, Palestine has been the scene of a war meant to wrest the country from its indigenous population. This war was waged by a settler-colonial movement with the unstinting backing, and sometimes the participation of, outside powers. Enormous discursive efforts have been exerted to obfuscate the basic nature of this struggle, and to present it solely in its religious, national and other dimensions. Faced with an ongoing and relentless process of dispossession, and with their very existence as a people threatened, the Palestinians have resisted against tremendous odds.  This war may be entering a new phase, with an aggressive Israeli regime still fully supported by the US openly committed to completing the settler colonial project, but meeting mounting Palestinian defiance and growing global condemnation of its openly supremacist and racist nature.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. He received a B.A. from Yale University and a D. Phil. from Oxford University, and has previously taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago. He is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and has served as President of the Middle East Studies Association. He is the author of eight books, most recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, and of over 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, and has co-edited three books.

ATTEND | Edward W. Said London Lecture 2023: Francesca Albanese + Nadia Abu El-Haj

Israel's Settler Colonialism: Law, Humanity, Empire
What have we learned from Edward Said on the Question of Palestine?

Francesca Albanese will deliver the lecture alongside respondent Nadia Abu El-Haj.

3 October 2023
The Mosaic Rooms | London

On the twentieth anniversary of his passing, Francesca Albanese explores Said’s profound legacy by delving into Israel’s settler colonial rule in the occupied Palestinian territory. Through a rigorous examination of international law within the context of global empire, Albanese confronts Israel’s colonial injustice and charts a course of action for legal and humanist resistance. Embracing Said’s work within the legal discipline entails upholding the principles of human rights and dignity, challenging oppressive systems and advocating for justice.

Francesca Albanese is an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, and a Senior Advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement for the think tank Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), where she co-founded the Global Network on the Question of Palestine (GNQP), a coalition of renowned professional and scholars engaged in/on Israel/Palestine. She has published widely on the legal situation in Israel/Palestine; her latest book, Palestinian Refugees in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2020), offers a comprehensive legal analysis of the situation of Palestinian refugees from its origins to modern-day reality. She regularly teaches and lectures on International Law and Forced Displacement in European and Arab universities, and speaks frequently at conferences and public events on the legal situation of Palestine. She worked for a decade as a human rights expert for the United Nations, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees. In these capacities, she advised the UN, governments, and civil society across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Asia Pacific, on the enforcement of human rights norms, especially for vulnerable groups including refugees and migrants. She holds a Law Degree (with honors) from the University of Pisa and an LLM in Human Rights from the University of London, SOAS. She is currently completing her PhD in International Refugee Law at Amsterdam University Law Faculty.

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 at Columbia. Among other publications, she is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002; The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012); and, most recently, Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America (Verso, 2022).

The annual Edward W. Said London Lecture series is supported by The Mosaic Rooms/A. M. Qattan Foundation and London Review of Books. Find out more about the series and previous speakers here.

ATTEND | Q&A w/ Shatha Hanaysha on 9/27/23 at 6PM

Hana Elias, MS '19, will be moderating a Q&A with Shatha Hanaysha, a Palestinian journalist from Jenin in the occupied West Bank. She has worked as a field journalist and reporter for several news websites and TV stations, including Middle East Eye. She has covered the region since 2015, often reporting on raids by Israeli occupation forces into Jenin and elsewhere in the West Bank. In May 2022, while reporting in Jenin as a correspondent for Ultra Palestine, she survived the shooting that killed Al Jazeera Correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh. She earned her bachelor’s in Palestine and is now pursuing a Master’s in Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. This event is co-sponsored by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, the Li Center on Global Journalism, and CJS_AMEJA.

Registration is required for this Columbia Journalism School event.  

  • Registration closes at 3 p.m. on the day of the event. 

  • Please note that no one who has not registered in advance to attend will be admitted. 

    • No substitutions are allowed. 

    • Please bring iD.