Professional Affiliation

University of California, Santa Barbara

Expert Bio

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University and a Masters in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. She held the Qatar Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University and the Europe in the Middle East Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Seikaly was Director of the Middle East Studies Center at the American University in Cairo (2012-2014). Seikaly is the co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. Seikaly's Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body.  It received the Middle East Political Economy Book Prize. Her forthcoming book titled From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine focuses on a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, a slaveholder and a refugee. His trajectory from nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. Seikaly has published in academic journals such as International Journal of Middle East Studies and Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies as well as in online venues including Jadaliyya, Mada Masr, and 7iber