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.

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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.

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.

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.

Third Annual Mahmoud Darwish Distinguished Lecture: Sinan Antoon

Ghosts haunt many of the late poems of the great Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). These ghosts often appear in poems where the poet writes of an imagined or actual return to Palestine. This talk will interrogate the presence of the ghost in these poems and read them as a discursive site to resist the erasure enacted by settler-colonialism and its maps and to gesture to the desire and right of return to a home/land.

Register here

Recent News

 2026-2027 Welcome Back Letter from the NDPS Chair

Workshops

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.

Mahmoud Darwish Professorship

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.

Mahmoud Darwish Distinguished Lecture Series

NDPS hosts an annual distinguished lecture, named after the renowned Palestinian poet and humanist Mahmoud Darwish, engaging in matters of pressing concern to Palestine and Palestinians through literature, art and the humanities more broadly.

Events

Events hosted by NDPS and others engaging with Palestine and/or the Palestinians.

NDPS Books

NDPS launched with University of California Press the first and only book series dedicated to Palestinian studies.

NDPS Journal Articles

This is a selected list of articles first presented at NDPS workshops and later appearing in a variety of publications.