The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Participant list

Sadia Agsous
Postdoctoral fellow
Literature, Civilization and Translation Studies
Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem (CRFJ)
Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah

Sadia Agsous is a postdoctoral fellow at The French research center in Jerusalem (CRFJ) with the support of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. Her research is focused on the cultural production (Arabic-Hebrew) of Palestinians in Israel (literature, cinema and media), on the Palestinian translators of Hebrew literature and on the Holocaust in the Arabic novel. Her book J’écris en hébreu, mais en arabe: L’identité palestinienne à l’épreuve dans l’écriture romanesque en hébreu is under contract with Classiques Garnier (2019).

Dr. Lauren Banko
Lecturer in Middle East History
Department of History
Yale University

Dr. Lauren Banko is currently a lecturer in Middle East History within the Department of History at Yale University. She just finished (in June 2018) a three-year post-doctoral fellowship in Israel/Palestine Studies at the University of Manchester. Lauren received her PhD in Modern Middle East History in 2014 from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She published her first monograph in 2016 with Edinburgh University Press, titled The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918-1947. Lauren works on the Palestine Mandate and themes of colonialism, Palestinian Arab citizenship and nationality and the discursive and practical understandings of those statuses as articulated by Palestine’s Arab residents and Arab émigrés. Lauren’s current research is framed by borderland studies and migration history. Her project posit borderlands and frontiers in interwar Palestine and the neighboring Arab states as sites of subversion and transgression as well as spaces of interaction amid shifting power relations. The research considers the implementation of imperial policies of documentary identity and migration control by the British and French as colonial powers, and the impact of these controls upon the population of the region.

Omer Bartov
John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History
Department of History
Brown University

Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. His early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, analyzed in his books, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (1985) and Hitler’s Army (1991). He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his books Murder in Our Midst (1996), Mirrors of Destruction (2000), and Germany’s War and the Holocaust (2003), as well as to the role of stereotypes in representations of violence, leading to his study, The Jew in Cinema (2005). Bartov’s growing interest in Eastern Europe is reflected in his study Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), which investigates the politics of memory in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. His most recent book is Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), where he reconstructs the transition of an interethnic community from long-term coexistence to genocidal violence. Bartov directed the project “Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples” at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in 2015-2018, and has begun researching a new book tentatively titled Israel, Palestine: A Personal Political History.

Uri S. Cohen
Associate Professor
Literature Department
Tel Aviv University

Professor Uri S. Cohen holds a PhD. from the Hebrew University and has served on the faculty of Columbia University (2004-2011). He currently teaches Hebrew and Italian literature at Tel Aviv University where he moved through an award from the Rothschild Foundation. He is the author of Survival: Senses of Death between the World Wars in Italy and Palestine (2007), Orly Castel Bloom (2011); his latest book is a study of the Hebrew culture of war: The Security Style (2017), and he is currently working on an anti-biography of Primo Levi.

Alon Confino
Director, Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies
Professor of History and Jewish Studies
Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Alon Confino is Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies at the departments of history and Jewish Studies at the UMass Amherst, where he is the director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. His last book is A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014), for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is at work on a book on 1948 in Palestine, which crafts two narratives: one is based on the experience of Palestinians, Jews, and British based on letters, diaries, and oral history, and the second is placing 1948 within global perspective of decolonization, self determination, forced migrations, partitions, and the post-1945 international order. His article, “When Genia and Henryk Kowalski Challenged History, Jaffa 1949: Between the Holocaust and the Nakba,” will be published later this year in Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018, forthcoming).

Maurice Ebileeni
Lecturer
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Haifa

Maurice Ebileeni is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Haifa and he is the author of Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense. The title of his current research project is “Global Itineraries of Displacement: Palestinian Writings in the World” which focuses on the production of Palestinian literature in languages other than Arabic from around the globe.

Shay Hazkani
Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies
The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies
University of Maryland

Dr. Shay Hazkani is an Assistant Professor in History and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He researches the social and cultural history of Israel/Palestine, with a focus on Mizrahi Jews in Israel and the Jewish communities of the Arab world. His current research project focuses on personal letters of Israeli and Arab soldiers from the 1948 War. His work has appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studiesand in Israel Studies Review, and he also publishes historical pieces in the Israel-daily Haaretz. Dr. Hazkani earned his PhD degree in History and Judaic studies in 2016 from New York University, his Master’s from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University and his B.A in Middle Eastern Studies from Tel Aviv University.

Hannan Hever
Jacob & Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language & Literature and Comparative Literature
Department of Comparative Literature and the Judaic Studies Program
Yale University

Hannan Hever is the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature and Comparative Literature at Yale University and he is an Emeritus Prof. at the Hebrew University. He is teaching at Yale in Comparative Literature Department and affiliated with the Program of Judaic Studies. He has published extensively about Modern Hebrew Literature and Culture and Theory of Literature and Culture from political, post-national and post-colonial perspectives. Among his books are Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon, Nation Building and Minority Discourse (2002), Beautiful Motherland of Death: Aesthetics and Politics in U. Z. Greenberg’s Poetry (2004), They Shall Dwell at the Haven of the Sea: The Sea in Modern Hebrew Culture (2007), With the Power of God, Political Theology in Modern Hebrew Literature (2014), Nativism, Zionism and Beyond: three Essays on Nativist Hebrew Poetry (2014). To Inherent the Land, To Conquer the Space: The Birth of Hebrew Poetry in Eretz Yisrael (2015), Suddenly the Sight of War: Nationalism and Violence in the Hebrew Poetry of the 1940s (2016), His most recent book is We are Broken Rhymes, The Politics of Trauma in Israeli Literature (2017).

David Mednicoff
Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Public Policy
Chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies
University of Massachusetts Amherst

David Mednicoff is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Public Policy, and Chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at UMass-Amherst. David holds a J.D. and Ph.D. (Political Science) from Harvard University. He works on the intersection of legal ideas, politics and policy issues in contemporary Arab societies, and is currently completing a book manuscript on the meanings and politics of the rule of law in Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar and Tunisia.

Fredrik Meiton
Assistant Professor of History
Department of History
University of New Hampshire

Fredrik Meiton is assistant professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. He specializes in the history of science and technology in the modern Middle East. He is the author of Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation (University of California Press, 2019), which charts the construction of mandatory Palestine’s electric grid as it co-evolved with the increasingly divided politics and society of the area, in an effort to rethink both the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the interplay of power, science, and technology more broadly.

Laila Parsons
Professor of Modern Middle East History
Joint appointment Department of History and Classical Studies and Institute of Islamic Studies
McGill University

Laila Parsons is Professor of Modern Middle East History at McGill University, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and Classical Studies and the Institute of Islamic Studies. She is the author of The Druze Between Palestine and Israel, 1947-1949 (Macmillan, 2000) and numerous journal articles on the 1948 War, on rebel soldiers in the inter-war period, and on the place of narrative and biography in the historiography of the modern Middle East. Her most recent book, The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence, 1914-1948 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2016), was the recipient of the Palestine Book Award (2017), and the Distinguished Book Award for Military History (2017). Her new project focuses on the procedural mechanics of colonial commissions in Mandate Palestine, and how those mechanics served to exclude the Palestinian leadership. For a recent interview in Jadaliyya where she discusses her research, including the new project that she will be presenting on at the workshop, see: http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34799/Ilham-Makdisi-Interviews-Laila-Parsons

Laura Robson
Associate Professor
Department of History
Portland State University

Laura Robson (PhD Yale, 2009) is Associate Professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Portland State University. Her most recent book, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (University of California Press, 2017) explores the history of forced migration, population exchange, and refugee resettlement in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine during the interwar period. She is also the author of Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (2011) and editor of Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives (2016), and is co-editor with Arie Dubnov of the forthcoming collected volume Partitions: A Transnational History of 20th Century Territorial Separatism, expected from Stanford University Press in January 2019.

Kathryn A. Schwartz
Assistant Professor
Department of History
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Kathryn A. Schwartz is an assistant professor in the History Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a historian of the modern Middle East, and her research currently focuses on the social and book history of nineteenth-century Egypt.

Anton Shammas
Professor of Middle Eastern Literature
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of Middle East Studies
University of Michigan

A Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, since 1997, Anton Shammas is a Palestinian writer and translator of Arabic, Hebrew and English. His publications include a novel in Hebrew (translated into 9 languages), two collections of poems and a book for children in Hebrew; a collection of poems in Arabic; and many articles, essays and translations in the three languages. He is currently working on a book manuscript: Blind Spots and other essays on translation.

Dmitry Shumsky
Senior Lecturer
Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Dr. Dmitry Shumsky is a senior lecturer in Israel Studies and Nationalism Studies at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and former director of its Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel. His new book, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion, is coming out this month with Yale University Press.

Jonathan Skolnik
Associate Professor
German & Scandinavian Studies
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Jonathan Skolnik is Associate Professor of German at UMass Amherst, where he is also on the faculty in Film Studies; History; and Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. He is the author of Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, Minority Culture (Stanford UP, 2014). In 2016-17 he was interim director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies.

Shira Wilkof
Thomas Arthur Arnold Postdoctoral Fellow
Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies
Tel Aviv University

Shira Wilkof is a Thomas Arthur Arnold Postdoctoral Fellow at The Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on the history of modern planning and urbanism, with a particular interest in professional transnationalism and the spatial making of Mandate Palestine and modern Israel. Shira received her PhD in Architectural and Urban History in 2017 from UC Berkeley, her Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from The Technion, and her BA in History and Geography from The Hebrew University.

Yael Zerubavel
Professor, Jewish Studies and History
Founding Director, The Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life
Rutgers University

Yael Zerubavel is Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers and was the founding director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life (1996-2018). She received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, and returned to it as faculty (1988-1996). Professor Zerubavel has published extensively in the areas of collective memory, Israeli culture, war and trauma, and symbolic landscapes. Her books include the award-winning Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford University Press, 2018). She is currently working on her book Biblical Reenactments: The Performance of Antiquity in Israeli Culture. She has served on the boards of the Association for Jewish Studies and the association for Israel Studies and on the editorial boards of key journals in Israel Studies.