Orwa Switat, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Palestinian Studies, is an urban planning scholar with degrees in philosophy, political science and urban planning. He focuses on the status of groups in planning theory and practice. He has been a Religion and Public Life Fellow in Conflict and Peace at Harvard Divinity School and a visiting scholar in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. 

Switat has extensive experience promoting spatial justice and heritage preservation among Palestinian communities. 

In his research, he integrates digitization and visualization with discourse and planning analysis to uncover hidden histories, restore lost heritages, spatialize oral histories, visualize counter-hegemonic narratives and develop innovative restorative planning approaches.

Loubna Qutami is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Qutami is a former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2018-2020) and received her PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside (2018) and an MA from the College of Ethnic Studies: Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas program at San Francisco State University (2013). Qutami’s research examines transnational Palestinian youth movements after the 1993 Oslo Accords through the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Her work is based on scholar-activist ethnographic research methods. Qutami’s broader scholarly interests include Palestine, critical refugee studies, the racialization of Arab/Muslim communities in the U.S., settler-colonialism, youth movements, transnationalism, and indigenous and Third World Feminism. Qutami was a co-founder of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and is currently a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC).

Paul Kohlbry is an anthropologist who works at the intersection of law, economy, and settler colonial studies. His project as Palestinian Studies postdoc explored how private property has come to orient land politics in the West Bank, tracking how shifts in rural political economy and transformations in property law  shaped Palestinian land defense projects since the 1980s. More broadly, his writing tries to bring Palestine into conversation with a broader range of Indigenous experiences through the lens of political economy. He has also worked with grassroots Palestinian organizations in the West Bank and is interested in learning how research can speak to the needs and concerns of movements. He completed his dissertation at Johns Hopkins University. At Brown, he taught on land and environmental politics and developed his book manuscript.

Alex Winder received his PhD in May 2017 from the joint program in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. His dissertation focused on policing and crime in British Mandate Palestine, with attention to negotiations and tensions between Arab policemen and Arab communities and between legal and social order. He edited Between Jaffa and Mount Hebron: The Diary of Muhammad ‘Abd al-Hadi al-Shrouf (Institute for Palestine Studies, 2016) and was associate editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly.

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury was the inaugural Post-doctoral Research Associate in Palestine and Palestinian Studies at Brown University 2016-2017. She was also an associate researcher at Mada al-Carmel – The Arab Center for Applied Social Research. Her book project examined relations between members of leftist Zionists kibbutzim and Palestinian villagers in Northern Palestine within a settler colonial framework. Sabbagh-Khoury completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. She contributed to several book chapters and articles on citizenship, memory, gender and settler colonialism, among them “Palestinian Predicaments: Jewish Immigration and Refugees Repatriation.” She also co-edited two volumes of The Palestinians in Israel: A Guide to History, Politics, and Society: the first volume was published in 2011 and the second on December 2015 (both volumes were published in English, Hebrew and Arabic). She has received several awards and grants for her research, among them a PARC fellowship; a Fulbright Post-doctoral Scholar Award for 2015-2016; and the 2015 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Columbia University.