Birth: NULL/NULL/1957 Death:NULL/NULL/NULL
Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957 to a Palestinian family that was forced out of Haifa during the 1948 Naqba; moved with his family to a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, in 1959, where he spent his childhood until 1970, when they emigrated to Toledo, Ohio, in the US; earned a scholarship to study at Kenyon College, receiving a BA, majoring in History, in 1977; continued his studies at the Center for Arab Studies at Georgetown University, earning an MA in 1980; spent a year in Syria on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1981/2; back in Georgetown University, he worked on his PhD focusing on the cultural history of Palestine (1990); returned to Palestine and became a lecturer at Birzeit University from 1986-88; from 1989-97, Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania University; spent a year as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies in Washington, DC, before joining the University of California, Berkeley, as Professor in fall 1998; founded the Middle East Social and Cultural History Association at Berkeley; organized the first conference on the Family History in the Middle East in 2000; organized a national conference on ‘Academic Freedom After September 11th’ at Berkeley in Feb. 2004; member of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Middle East Research and Information Project, the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Professors, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies; wrote numerous articles and essays as well as two books: Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (University of California Press, 1995), and Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).
