To interview Beshara Doumani contact the IMEU at 714-368-0300 or info@imeu.net

Palestinian-American professor Beshara Doumani.

UC Berkeley History professor and respected author Beshara Doumani focuses on "recovering the history of social groups, places, and time periods that have been silenced or erased by conventional scholarship on the modern Middle East." He has also played a leadership role in defending academic freedom since 9/11.

"My personal story is typical of many Palestinians," says Beshara Doumani. His father's family was forced out of Haifa when Israel was established in 1948. Doumani was born in Saudi Arabia in 1957 - far from his father's home.

Doumani spent his early years in Lebanon before moving to Toledo, Ohio in 1970. He was one of the few non-African-Americans living in the projects of Toledo, and later the only Arab student at Kenyon College. Doumani recalls first hand the sordid effects of racism directed at Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular.

After Kenyon, Doumani earned his M.A. in 1980 from Georgetown University. He spent a year in Syria on a Fulbright Scholarship and then taught for two years at Birzeit University in the West Bank. Going to Palestine, Doumani says, "was incredible. I felt immediately at home."

In 1983, Doumani began his doctorate work at Georgetown. His dissertation became the beginnings of his first book, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, published by UC Press in 1995. From 1989 to 1997, Beshara Doumani taught at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1996-1997 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.; and in 2001-2002 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin).

In 2003, his first edited book, Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender was published by SUNY Press. He is on the editorial committees of the Journal of Palestine Studies and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

In February 2006, Zone Books published his second edited volume, Academic Freedom After September 11, the outgrowth of a conference by the same name he organized at UC Berkeley in 2004. Doumani is currently chair of the North America Committee of the Middle East Studies Association's Committee on Academic Freedom.

Doumani received a Fellowship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, MA for the 2007-2008 academic year. There, he is working on his next two books: a social history of the Palestinians, and a comparative history of women and the family in Palestine and Lebanon.

Op-Ed by Beshara Doumani:

Hamas in charge, Los Angeles Times