Participants
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (historian, Jerusalem / member of EUME)
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin is a historian and professor of Jewish history at Ben Gurion University. He is one of the most prominent advocates of a bi-nationalist solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His main areas of theoretical interest are Christian-Jewish discourse of the early Modern Age and the history of Zionist ideas. In 1996, he graduated at the University of Tel Aviv in the subject: “The Nationalist Portrayal of the Exile, Zionist Historiography, and Medieval Jewry”. He also works at the Alma College, a forum for liberal art and a center for studies in Hebraic culture. His publications include: Exile et Binationalisme (Paris) and Orientalism, Jewish Studies and Israeli Society (in Hebraic). In 2003-2004, he was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin and is a member of the research program “Europe in the Middle East – the Middle East in Europe”. Works he co-authored include The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Sherene Seikaly
is Assistant Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. She is Co-Editor of the Arab Studies Journal. She received her doctoral degree in September 2007 from the Departments of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. She is presently working on her manuscript based on her dissertation, Meatless Days: Consumption and Capitalism in Wartime Palestine 1939-1948. Situated at the intersections of studies of consumption, political economy, and colonialism, her research traces the formation of a Palestinian Arab middle class before the defining rupture of 1948. Seikaly’s interests range from social and cultural history of daily practices to the trajectories of colonial and post-colonial development. She has lectured and is writing on topics including, “The New Arab Home: Consumer, Housewife, and Citizen in Forties Palestine,” “A Public Good? Palestinian Businessmen and the British Colonial State,” “Nakba and Historiography: The Centrality of Catastrophe in Palestinian History,” and “Food for All Under Control: Nutrition and Colonial Development in 1940s Palestine.” She currently is a fellow of the Berlin based research program Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe.
Hassan Khader (author, Berlin/Ramallah)
Hassan Khader, Palestinian author and literary critic, lives and works in Ramallah and Berlin. He is editor-in-chief of the literary journal Al-Karmel. His fields of work include poetry, short stories and novels. He also publishes articles on the possibility of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and is engaged in a critical-constructive debate on issues related to the peace process in the Middle East.
Georges Khali (EUME)
Georges Khali (born in Munich in 1965), a historian and specialist in Islamic studies, has served as scientific co-ordinator at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin since 1998. Until 2006, he worked for the working group Modernity and Islam. He is currently director of the research programme “Europe in the Middle Easte – the Middle East in Europe” run by the Brandenburgishe Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.