Mainstream discussions on Palestine have long been dominated by voices that have sought to sideline, if not wholly invisibilise, Palestinian narrations centring experiences ranging from the Nakba to the Israeli Occupation. This occlusion has carried with it serious implications on our collective understanding of the causes underlying the Palestine-Israel conflict. This lecture series aims to address this distortion by amplifying (and reclaiming) Palestinian scholarly voices to raise critical awareness on Palestinian history as well as offering context to the current situation that resists the continuous attempt to ‘normalise’ the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians. The lecture series also gives space to these voices to narrate and imagine pathways toward a just and dignified (future) Palestine.

The series will be launched by Professor Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley from 12pm to 1:30pm on Thursday 11th April online.

Professor Makdisi’s publications include Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (UCP 2019); Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs, 2010);  Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), which won many prestigious prizes; Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000) and co-editor of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana University Press, 2006). He has published widely on Ottoman and Arab history, Palestine history, as well as on U.S.-Arab relations and U.S. missionary work in the Middle East.