Long-term Fellowships at the Palestinian American Research Center
FAIN: RA-259412-18
PARC (Washington, DC 20015-1671)
Penelope Mitchell (Project Director: August 2017 to January 2026)
8 months of stipend support (1-2 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.
PARC proposes a FPIRI postdoctoral fellowship program in the humanities or humanities-related fields, with 2 fellowships per year, 1 of 4 and 1 of 6 months (10 months total per year). With 18 years’ experience in selecting and administering fellowship programs, PARC has extensive outreach in the community of scholars working on Palestine, expertise in conducting a fair, impartial selection process to make awards to the strongest applicants, a well-recognized record of PARC alumni fellows’ achievement and publication, and an established office in Palestine that acts as an intellectual hub for U.S., Palestinian, and international scholars. Our Palestine office has a unique library of holdings on Palestinian social/cultural history and provides scholars with unprecedented access to local archives and collections. PARC will utilize its experience and expertise to select and support NEH fellows in carrying out successful, significant research in the humanities and humanities-related fields.
Associated Products
Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (Book)Title: Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948
Author: Nadim Bawalsa
Abstract: Tens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians lived outside geographic Palestine. Transnational Palestine is the first book to explore the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America, the struggles Palestinian migrants faced to secure Palestinian citizenship in the interwar period, and the ways in which these challenges contributed to the formation of a Palestinian diaspora and to the emergence of Palestinian national consciousness.
Nadim Bawalsa considers the migrants' strategies for economic success in the diaspora, for preserving their heritage, and for resisting British mandate legislation, including citizenship rejections meted out to thousands of Palestinian migrants. They did this in newspapers, social and cultural clubs and associations, political organizations and committees, and in hundreds of petitions and pleas delivered to local and international governing bodies demanding justice for Palestinian migrants barred from Palestinian citizenship. As this book shows, Palestinian political consciousness developed as a thoroughly transnational process in the first half of the twentieth century—and the first articulation of a Palestinian right of return emerged well before 1948.
Year: 2022
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781503629110
Copy sent to NEH?: No
The Transnationalization of Palestine: Jerusalem's Defense of Palestinian Migrants in the Interwar Period (Article)Title: The Transnationalization of Palestine: Jerusalem's Defense of Palestinian Migrants in the Interwar Period
Author: Nadim Bawalsa
Abstract: Following the promulgation of the 1925
Palestinian Citizenship Order-in-Council, British
Mandate authorities regularly denied Palestinian
citizenship to thousands of Palestinian migrants
across the diaspora (mahjar) – mainly the Latin
American mahjar, where the largest Palestinian
communities resided. In response, Palestinians
in Palestine formed the Committee for the
Defense of the Rights of Palestinians in Foreign
Countries in 1927. A group of nationalists,
including Musa Kazim al-Husayni, submitted
petitions to the Government of Palestine and
the League of Nations demanding justice for
migrants barred from their rights to Palestinian
citizenship – and thus, to their right to return to
Palestine as Palestinians. Importantly, the editors
of Filastin newspaper called on Palestinian
leaders to reform and unite, doing away with
divisive rivalries, in order to defend the rights of
Palestinian migrants. In entry after entry, Filastin
decried the state of the current Palestinian
leadership, stressing the interconnectedness of
Palestinian migrants’ struggle to secure their
rights to Palestinian citizenship and the struggle
to reform the faltering Palestinian nationalist
movement.
These efforts of Palestinians in Palestine to
protest British citizenship policy and to reform the
Palestinian nationalist movement through solidarity
with Palestinian migrants demonstrate that
Palestinian political consciousness in the interwar
period formed and developed transnationally.
Through their activism, Palestinians in Palestine
brought Palestinian migrants’ voices home, and
contributed to the emergence and consolidation of
a Palestinian diaspora, and to the amplification of
Palestinian voices transnationally. The Palestinian
struggle for a right of return began well before
1948.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
http://https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/The%20Transnationalization%20of%20Palestine.pdfAccess Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Jerusalem Quarterly
Publisher: Institute for Palestine Studies
Teta Nabiha's (Article)Title: Teta Nabiha's
Author: Nadim Bawalsa
Abstract: “Teta Nabiha’s” is an account of return
to Palestine written in creative prose.
The essay offers a personalized, nonfictional narrative of the Said family
home in Talbiyya, Jerusalem, which
my mother’s grandparents, Nabiha
and Boulos, built with their cousin
Wadie in the 1930s, and to which they
never returned following their flight
from Palestine in late 1947. On the
one hand, “Teta Nabiha’s” is a story of
the family home itself, and what has
become of it since its confiscation by
the Israeli state in 1948. On the other,
it is a literary account of our return –
my mother, brother, stepfather, and
me – in late 2011 to Talbiyya and
to what remains of Teta Nabiha’s.
Using a combination of secondary
source research, family photographs,
satellite imagery, descriptive prose,
dialogue, and a mix of literary styles,
“Teta Nabiha’s” seeks to reimagine
Palestinian narratives of return in
a way that goes beyond loss and
sorrow to imaginatively explore an
altogether new tone of Palestinian
literature infused with humor, love,
sentimentality, creativity, and hope.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/Teta%20Nabiha%E2%80%99s.pdfAccess Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Jerusalem Quarterly
Publisher: Institute for Palestine Studies
āltāryẖ ālḏy lm ynth bʿd (Article)Title: āltāryẖ ālḏy lm ynth bʿd
Author: Amal Eqeiq
Abstract: "التاريخ الذي لم ينته بعد" هو حوار بيني وبين الباحث المكسيكي لويس مارتينس أندرادي، المُتخصص في الدراسات الاجتماعية وتاريخ لاهوت التحرّر في أميركا اللاتينيّة. نُشِر هذا الحوار في أنطولوجيا "نسويات خارج السرب"1 عن دار نشر لاڤوراخين في إسبانيا، وتشمل الأنطولوجيا ستّ عشرة مقابلة شخصيّة أجراها لويس بالإسبانيّة والفرنسيّة مع باحثات ومفكّرات نسويّات من الجنوب العالمي. تشكّل هذه المقابلات حواراً عابراً للأجيال والقارّات بين نسويّات عريقات ساهمن في تطوير لغة نسويّة مناهضة للعنف الجنسي والعنصريّة والرأسماليّة مثل ريتا سيغاتو (الأرجنتين) سيلڤيا فيدريتشي (إيطاليا) وفرانسوا ڤيرچيس (فرنسا) ونسويّات صاعدات من أميركا اللاتينيّة والكاريبي مثل كارينا أوتشوا (المكسيك) ومارغرا مييان (المكسيك) اللواتي شاركن في تأسيس حراك نسوي تحرّري في إطار مستقلّ ضمن الحركات الاجتماعية للشعوب الأصليّة. وقد أثبتت هذه الحركات من خلال تجربتها التاريخية الطويلة مع أطياف الماركسية وتعدّدية أنواع الاشتراكية أنّ عنف الدولة في أميركا اللاتينيّة والكاريبي وحلول الإصلاحات المؤسساتية التي تقدّمها للسكّان الأصليين والنساء، ما هي إلّا نسخة مُحدّثة لسياسات الاستعمار الرأسمالي، وبالتالي يجب على النضال النسوي أن يتصدّى لأساليب وطرح الحداثة الكولونيالية لأنها ترسخ الهرمية العرقية والاقتصادية التي بَناها الاستعمار الأوروبي.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://kohljournal.press/node/242Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Tensions in Movement Building
From Haifa to Ramallah (and Back): New/Old Palestinian Literary Topography (Article)Title: From Haifa to Ramallah (and Back): New/Old Palestinian Literary Topography
Author: Amal Eqeiq
Abstract: This article explores border crossing and the Palestinian city as a literary metropolis—two major themes in the works of emerging Palestinian novelists in Israel. It looks at the “re-Palestinization” of urban space by writers who belong to a post-Oslo generation of Palestinian intellectuals that left villages and small towns in Israel to go and study, work, and live in the city. What distinguishes the literature of this generation is its negotiation of border crossing in a fragmented geography and its engagement with the city as a space of paradoxical encounter between a national imaginary and a settler-colonial reality. Based on a critical reading of their works, the article argues that Adania Shibli and Ibtisam Azem challenge colonial border discourse, exposing the ongoing Zionist erasure of the Palestinian city and creating a new topography for Palestinian literature. The article also traces the role of these writers in the “twinning” of Haifa and Ramallah starting in the late 1990s, and it examines how this literary and cultural “sisterhood” informs spatial resistance.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1525/jps.2019.48.3.26Access Model: Supscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Palestine Studies
Publisher: Institute for Palestine Studies
Palestinian counter-forensics and the cruel paradox of property (Article)Title: Palestinian counter-forensics and the cruel paradox of property
Author: Paul Kohlbry
Abstract: In disputes between Palestinian landowners and the Israeli state, several Palestinian surveyors in the West Bank use Ottoman-era deeds to establish preinvasion land claims. Through a distinct practice of counter-forensics, these surveyors transform landscapes, documents, and local knowledge into evidence of property ownership. They seek to establish the fact of Palestinian ownership before Israeli invasion and to build a legal and political narrative in which the settler state marks a deviation from scientific objectivity, liberal norms, and international political community. Counter-forensics is part of a living archive of land defense in which property claims are both provisional and universal. As surveyors move through the cruel paradox of property, they engage in an anti-colonial legal practice that seeks to hold the collective territory of the nation through a technical negotiation over individual plots of land. Their efforts reveal how property rights fail to protect Palestinian land, as well as why these rights remain important for those who defend the land. [property, law, land, surveying, counter-forensics, settler colonialism, West Bank, Israel/Palestine]
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/amet.13084Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Ethnologist
Publisher: the American Ethnological Society
To cover the land in green: rain-fed agriculture and anti-colonial land reclamation in Palestine (Article)Title: To cover the land in green: rain-fed agriculture and anti-colonial land reclamation in Palestine
Author: Paul Kohlbry
Abstract: In the 1980s, Palestinian agronomists, activists, and farmers turned land reclamation into an anti-colonial project in the West Bank. Drawing on technical studies, interviews, and fieldwork, this article argues that anti-colonial reclamation is a composite of modernist engineering, peasant tradition, and international Leftist thought. Palestinian experts and voluntary work activists used reclamation to confront colonization and build a political collective to sustain territorial struggle. Today, this legacy shapes plans for landscape transformation and efforts to revitalize village agriculture. Reclamation highlights the importance of agricultural interventions in Palestinian anti-colonialism and reveals connections between seemingly disparate agrarian and Indigenous struggles against dispossession.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2022.2120807Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Journal of Peasant Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Selling Rural Palestine: Land Devaluation, Ethical Investment, and the Limits of Human Rights (Article)Title: Selling Rural Palestine: Land Devaluation, Ethical Investment, and the Limits of Human Rights
Author: Paul Kohlbry
Abstract: This article is a study of the causes and consequences of making Palestinian land into an ethical investment. It builds on fieldwork in villages north of Ramallah where a Palestinian real estate company purchased devalued agricultural lands and offered them to Palestinian buyers as an ethical investment. It argues that through private titling, planning, and infrastructure, this company secured land for potential investors and produced an imaginary of rural areas as empty and unowned. It created enclaves that protect the rights of new owners but undermine the possibilities for collective land defence, and it pioneered a model of development that will transform the use and control of village land across the West Bank. Rather than an example of a company that uses human rights to cover up illegality, this case illuminates the limits of human rights for critiquing capital and settler colonialism and for understanding the forces that are reshaping rural Palestine.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/anti.12912Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Antipode
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Murabitat al-Aqsa: the new virgins of Palestinian resistance (Article)Title: Murabitat al-Aqsa: the new virgins of Palestinian resistance
Author: Kenneth Schmitt
Abstract: In the fall of 2015, Israel outlawed the Murabitat, a group of Palestinian Muslim
women using their voices and bodies to protect al-Aqsa Mosque from right-wing
Jewish incursions into the sacred site. Israel placed blame on the Islamic
Movement of Israel, but this explanation lacks substantially. I argue, instead,
that the better way to interpret the Murabitat is by focusing on the Murabitat
themselves—how they understood their actions and how those actions related to
broader social, political, and religious currents within Palestinian society and the
Israel-Palestine conflict. The Murabitat demonstrated both continuity and innovation within the field of Palestinian women’s political participation in resistance toward the Israeli occupation. They framed their resistance in wellestablished, domestic and non-violent terms. But they also innovated by mobilizing these themes for the specific purpose of protecting the Haram al-Sharif.
Drawing together the latent, symbolic resonance of ribat language within the
discursive tradition of Islam, articulating their attachment to the sacred space
through domestic metaphors, and using the phrase “Allahu Akbar” as a ritual of
protest, the Murabitat forged new possibilities for women’s participation in
political struggle in Palestine. In short, they became the new virgins of the
Palestinian resistance.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.proquest.com/docview/2471676666Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Contemporary Islam
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Gazan Christians: Pilgrimage Permits, Migration, and the Exchange of Precarity (Article)Title: Gazan Christians: Pilgrimage Permits, Migration, and the Exchange of Precarity
Author: Kenneth Schmitt
Abstract: This study casts light on the dynamics driving Christian migration from the Gaza Strip and its consequences. By analyzing the historical background and institutionalization of Palestinian movement restrictions—specifically the pilgrimage permit regime—the article explores the temporal and spatial entanglements of pilgrimage, migration, and politics. Since 2007, deteriorating conditions have led Gazan Christians to use temporary pilgrimage permits as a pretext to permanently escape the Strip. The article argues that this migration is driven by the overwhelming precarity of Gazan Christians’ life circumstances, a precarity that includes temporal and spatial, political and economic, religious and personal insecurities. Further, those who escape do not find themselves in a better situation; they experience geographic isolation and communal fragmentation within the West Bank. The process of Gazan Christian migration is best understood as the mere exchange of precarity.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://brill.com/view/journals/exch/49/3-4/article-p316_7.xml?language=enAccess Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Exchange
No Zoom Fatigue for Revived Baptist Church in Gaza (Article)Title: No Zoom Fatigue for Revived Baptist Church in Gaza
Author: Kenneth Schmitt
Abstract: COVID-19 provides a silver lining for dwindling community of Palestinian evangelicals, whose now-electronic fellowship brought 100 together for Christmas.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/december-web-only/gaza-baptist-church-christmas-zoom-fatigue-revival.htmlAccess Model: open access
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: Christianity Today
Publisher: Christianity Today International