Maha Nassar

I am a cultural and intellectual historian of the twentieth-century Arab world, with a focus on Palestinian history. My research traces global circulations of social, political and cultural identities. I hold a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.

My first monograph, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines how Palestinian cultural producers in Israel during the 1950s and ‘60s positioned themselves within an Arab and third world social, cultural and intellectual milieu that extended far beyond the confines of the Israeli nation-state. By mapping the strategies they deployed, my book demonstrates the importance of Arabic newspapers and literary journals in traversing national boundaries and in creating transnational and transregional communities of solidarity. In 2018 Brothers Apart received a Palestine Book Award for academic titles.

My scholarship has been published in IJMES, Journal of Palestine Studies, Arab Studies Journal, and elsewhere. I’m also an active public historian, with analysis pieces in The Washington Post and The Conversation, as well as media appearances on NPR, PBS, and Vox. In 2024, I received a Woman of Impact Award from the University of Arizona’s Office of Research, Innovation, and Impact. My current book project examines Palestinians’ historical conceptions and practices of steadfastness (sumud).

My recent scholarly publications include:

“Exodus, Nakba Denialism, and the Mobilization of Anti-Arab Racism” Critical Sociology 49, no. 6 (Fall 2023): 1037-1051.

“Palestinian Citizens of Israel,” in Routledge Companion to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Asaf Siniver (New York: Routledge, 2022), 320-335.

“Between Two States and One: Palestinian Citizens of Israel,” in Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, edited by Leila Farsakh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021), 253-276.

Book review of Adel Manna’s Al-Nakba wa’l-Baqa’: Hikayat Filastiniyiin dhallu fi Haifa wa’l-Jalil (Nakba and Survival: The Stories of Palestinians who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee (2017). American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (2020): 559-563.