This lecture explores the historical evolution of Palestine as a socio political and cultural entity, and the origins, and global context of the birth and evolution of the Palestinian question. Using a multi-disciplinary approach the lecture focuses on the cultural symbols of historical and contemporary Palestine, the role played by settler and British colonialism since the beginning of the 20^th century, and the territorial and urban transformations of historical Palestine before and after the 1948  Nakbah.

Prof. dr. Nelida Fuccaro is a historian of the modern Middle East and Professor of History at NYU Abu Dhabi, formerly based at SOAS, University of London. She has researched, taught and published on the Middle East for thirty years. Her research has focussed on British colonialism in Iraq and Palestine, the interplay between ethnicity, nationalism and ‘minority societies’, urban history, and the history of public violence. Her recent work on the social and cultural history of the oil industry in Iraq, Gulf and Arabian Peninsula is located at the intersection of History, Social and Visual Anthropology, the Energy Humanities, and Science and Technology Studies. Her publications include The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq (IB Tauris, 1999), Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2009, paperback 2011), Urban Violence in the Middle East (Berghahn, 2015, co-editor), and Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2016, editor). She has recently co-edited with Mandana Limbert a Life Worlds of Black Gold: Histories and Ethnographies of Middle Eastern Oil (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and authored Traces: Charting Oil’s Urban Imprints (al Manakh/Art Jameel, 2026).

The lecture will be held in English and is organised within the framework of the project Ethnography of Silence(s) (ARIS J6-50198), led by Prof. Katja Hrobat Virloget.