ICM LECTURE SERIES
BESHARA DOUMANI
Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies, Brown University
"A Modern History of the Palestinians Through the Social Life of Stone"
Monday, May 6, 2024
Goldwin Smith Hall 64 | Kaufmann Auditorium
4:45 p.m —6:15 p.m.
Abstract
This talk is a tentative exploration of the social life of stone as an organizing device to write a modern history of the Palestinians in ways that are not beholden to nationalist constructions of the past, nor fully captured by the structural grip of the settler-colonial paradigm. Central to the built environment and material culture, rich in symbolic capital, and key to political economy, stone brings into view the diversity and internal contradictions of Palestinian life that have long been hidden in the shadows of over-determined political narratives. Whether extracted, sold, shaped, displayed, thrown, turned into rubble, or used as a metaphor, stone tells stories that engage three fundamental questions: Who are the Palestinians? What do they want? And how can they achieve their goals?
Bio
Professor Beshara Doumani served as President of Birzeit University in Palestine from 2021-2023. He is the founding director (2012-2018) of Brown's Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), and founder of New Directions for Palestinian Studies, a CMES initiative since 2012.
Doumani's research focuses on groups, places, and time periods marginalized by mainstream scholarship on the early modern and modern Middle East, with a focus on the social, economic, and legal history of Eastern Mediterranean. He also writes on the topics of academic freedom, and the Palestinian condition. His books include Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, and Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History. He is currently working on the modern history of the Palestinians through the social life of stone.
Doumani is the editor of a book series on Palestinian Studies published by the University of California Press, and co-editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly. From 2009-2011, Doumani led a team that produced a strategic plan for the establishment of the Palestinian Museum. In 2015, Doumani and received the Sawyer Seminar award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the proposal, Displacement and the Making of the Modern World: Histories, Ecologies, and Subjectivities.
Doumani joined Brown in 2012 after fourteen years at the University of California, Berkeley, and was first tenured at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1997-1998), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2001-2002), and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2006-2007). He was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton (2018-2019).
