Reimagining Palestine

Sarah Gualtieri (Moderator)

Sarah Gualtieri is a Professor of History and American Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. Professor Gualtieri’s research and teaching cover Middle Eastern studies, migration, Arab American studies, and critical ethnic studies, with a particular focus on race, gender, and power. She is the author of Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (University of California Press, 2009), and  Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California (Stanford University Press, 2019). Before joining GU-Q, she was a professor in the departments of American Studies and Ethnicity, History, and Middle East Studies at UCS Dornsife. She has received numerous national fellowships including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council.

Noura Erakat

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and Professor of Africana Studies and the Program of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Noura is a co-founding board member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival and a Board Member of Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In 2024, she served as the Co-Chair of an Independent Task Force on the Application of National Security Memorandum-20 to Israel, which submitted a report to the White House recommending suspending U.S. weapons transfers to Israel. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, as Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as national organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura has also produced video documentaries, including “Gaza In Context” and “Black Palestinian Solidarity.” Her writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Al Jazeera, and the Boston Review. She is a frequent commentator on CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, the BBC, and NPR, among others. She has been awarded fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies. In 2022, she was selected as a Freedom Fellow by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. 

Saleh Hijazi

Saleh Hijazi is the Apartheid-Free Policy Coordinator at the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), the leadership of the global nonviolent movement working to end complicity with and towards dismantling Israel’s settler-colonialism, military occupation, and apartheid. Before joining the BDS movement he spent 11 years at Amnesty International, most recently as MENA Deputy Regional Director, and was co-author of the organization’s report Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity. He had previously worked with Al-Quds University Human Rights Clinic in Palestine.

Sophie Richter Devroe

Sophie Richter-Devroe is an Associate Professor in the Women, Society and Development Program at the College of Humanities and Social Science, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Sophie’s broad research interests are in the field of everyday politics and women’s activism in the Middle East. She is the author of Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance and Survival (University of Illinois Press, 2018) which won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. She also conducted research on the oral histories, memories and narratives of women from the often forgotten Palestinian Naqab Bedouin population, and has worked with Dr Ruba Salih (SOAS) on a joint research on Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank. More recently, she has led a research project on Syrian refugees in Italy and Greece. The project investigates the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on the family and family-making practices in a transnational context. Her research is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Greece.

Zeina Zaatari

Zeina Zaatari, is the Director of the Arab American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She has worked on gender and racial justice in Arab and Arab American communities both within academic and non-profit spaces in programming and producing knowledge. Before joining UIC in January 2019, she worked as Research Director at Political Research Associates, an organization that studies movements on the Right. She serves as the Associate Editor for the Middle East and Africa (northern and sub-Saharan) for the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. She is a trainer and mentor for The Muslim Women in the Media Training Institute supporting journalism graduate students and junior journalists in better coverage and representation of Muslim women and their issues. She is a co-founder and elected board member to the Women Human Rights Defenders-MENA Coalition. Her recent publications include two co-edited books: Routledge Handbook on Women of the Middle East co-edited with Suad Joseph (2023) and The Politics of Engaged Gender Research in the Arab Region: Feminist Fieldwork and Knowledge Production co-edited with Suad Joseph and Lena Meari (I.B.Tauris 2022). Among her other publications include: Sarah Hegazy and the Struggle for Freedom, Middle East Report Online (2020), Social Movements and Revolution in A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East (2015, Wiley-Blackwell), and Desirable Masculinity/Femininity and Nostalgia of the “Anti-Modernity”: Bab el-Hara Television Series as a Site of Production in Sexuality and Culture (2014). Zeina is president-elect of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies for 2024-2026.