Over the past generation, the field of Palestine and Palestinian studies has grown rapidly, attracting some of the best and brightest scholars. Launched as a research initiative of Brown University’s Middle East Studies program in 2012, New Directions in Palestinian Studies (NDPS) has built an international community of scholars dedicated to shaping the agenda of knowledge production on Palestine and the Palestinians and to decolonizing and globalizing this field of study.
Center for Middle East Studies
Palestinian Studies
The New Directions in Palestinian Studies research initiative of Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies aims to shape scholarly works in this field through an annual workshop, an endowed post-doctoral fellowship, and a book series.
Palestinian Studies
The New Directions in Palestinian Studies research initiative of Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies aims to shape scholarly works in this field through an annual workshop, an endowed post-doctoral fellowship, and a book series.
Current Thematic Initiative
People and Ruins: Rebuilding Lives, Forging Futures
Rebuilding is a major through line in Palestinian Studies. Facing various forces of rupture, destruction and dispersal over more than a century, Palestinians have repeatedly taken up the task of building anew the material, social and political structures that shape their lives. This theme emerged as central to the call for papers for the tenth annual NDPS workshop on the theme (Re)Building Lives, Forging Futures. Over the 2025–26 academic year, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Palestinian Studies Orwa Switat is building upon this workshop by leading the research and public humanities project People and Ruins: Remapping Demolished Spaces and Displaced Narratives. This project investigates how Palestinians revive, rebuild and reimagine their demolished spaces in the face of ongoing dispossession, with a focus on Haifa and Gaza. NDPS will continue to take up these themes during the 2026–27 academic year, capped with the eleventh annual NDPS workshop.
During the Spring 2026 semester, a number of courses and events integrate digitization and visualization with discourse and urban planning analysis to uncover hidden histories and develop innovative restorative planning approaches. Switat’s People and Ruins studio course engages demolished spaces not as absences but as living archives. Students in the class produce original digital and visual projects that bridge scholarship and creative practice to reconstruct landscapes of loss through maps, images and spatial narratives. Two webinars, Repositioning the International Discourse of Gaza Reconstruction and Gaza’s Reconstruction and the Question of Justice, bring together scholars and practitioners to challenge hegemonic reconstruction schemes and foreground justice-based and community-led decolonial alternatives. The Phoenix of Gaza XR Exhibition, an immersive experience featuring Gaza's historic landmarks, cultural traditions and daily life, is accompanied by a panel discussion, Visualizing Gaza: Healing, Recovery and Restoration, that explores digital archiving, virtual reality and urban planning as tools of repair and reconstruction. The People and Ruins project closes the Spring 2026 semester with a public lecture, People and Ruins: Remapping Narratives of Demolished Spaces in Haifa, which presents an interactive digital mapping project that reconstructs Haifa's Palestinian urban heritage through maps, oral histories and film. These various components of the People and Ruins project affirm Brown's New Directions in Palestinian Studies initiative as a vital forum for Palestinian-centered scholarship on urbicide, memory and restorative justice, making hidden histories visible and demolished futures imaginable.
NDPS organizes annual thematically-organized workshops, bringing together emerging and established scholars to take stock of research trends, identify promising new questions and sources and encourage networking across academic and research institutions.
Generous support by multiple donors provided the resources to establish the Mahmoud Darwish Professorship in Palestinian Studies, the first of its kind in the United States, with Professor Beshara Doumani as its inaugural holder.
NDPS hosts the first endowed post-doctoral fellowship dedicated to Palestinian Studies.
NDPS launched with University of California Press the first and only book series dedicated to Palestinian studies.
Beshara Doumani is the founder of NDPS and the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies. Doumani is the founding director (2012-2018) of Brown's Center for Middle East Studies and served as President of Birzeit University in Palestine from 2021-2023.