Hanna Alshaikh
Al-Shabaka Member Hanna Alshaikh is an adjunct professor at DePaul University, teaching courses on political Islam, the intersections of religion and politics in the Middle East, and Islamic thought. Hanna is also a research fellow at the American Friends Service Committee, working on an oral history project on the Palestinian diasporic narrative, activism, immigration, and intergenerational issues. She holds a BA from DePaul University, where she double majored in Islamic World Studies and Arabic, and earned her MA from the University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). Her research focused on social and intellectual history in the late Ottoman Palestine.
Haidar Eid
Haidar Eid is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University. He has written widely on the Arab-Israeli conflict, including articles published at Znet, Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, and Open Democracy. He has published papers on cultural Studies and literature in a number of journals, including Nebula, Journal of American Studies in Turkey, Cultural Logic, and the Journal of Comparative Literature. Haidar is the author of Worlding Postmodernism: Interpretive Possibilities of Critical Theory and Countering The Palestinian Nakba: One State For All.
Fajr Harb
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Fajr Harb is a Palestinian political activist. He is currently the Assistant Director of The Carter Center Field Office in Ramallah. In addition to his experience in advocacy and fundraising, he has an academic background and training in the United States in both engineering and economic development.
Dina Matar
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Dina Matar is senior lecturer in political communication at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She works on the relationship between culture, communication and politics, with a special focus on Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. She is the author of “What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood” (Tauris, 2010); co-editor of “Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communication Practices in Palestine and Lebanon” (Taruis, 2013) and co-author of “The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication” (Hurst, 2014). Matar is also co-founding editor of the “The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.”
Dina Omar
Dina Omar is a writer and a graduate student studying Anthropology at Yale. She is a founding member of Students for Justice in Palestine-National and serves on the National Executive Board of the Palestine Youth Movement.
Dyala Hamzah
Al-Shabaka policy member Dyala Hamzah is an associate professor of Arab History at the University of Montreal. She served as editor of the 2013 Routledge volume The Making of the Arab Intellectual and is author of the forthcoming text, Muhammad Rashid Rida ou le Tournant Salafiste (CNRS Éditions, 2019). Dyala has published with Princeton and Oxford University Presses, as well as in academic journals including CSAAME, REMMM and Égypte-Monde Arabe. She is currently conducting a project on Mandate Palestine and Arab Nationalism. Her upcoming Palestine. Le Sionisme est-il réformable? is under contract with Presses de l’Université de Montréal (PUM, 2020).
Dena Qaddumi
Dena Qaddumi is an architect and urbanist currently based in Doha. Her research interests are primarily concerned with how social movements engage with urban space and how this process creates new avenues for citizenship formation.
Dalal Yassine
Dalal Yassine is a lawyer and advocate for gender and human rights for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Dalal has previously worked with several Palestinian NGOs in Lebanon and formerly served as coordinator for The Right to Work Campaign for Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon. She is the co-author of The Legal Status of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon (2007) and completed a multi-site study titled The Empowerment of Women in Refugee Camps in Lebanon.
Dana El Kurd
Al-Shabaka Member Dana El Kurd received her PhD in Government from The University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in Comparative Politics and International Relations. Her dissertation explores how international patrons affect authoritarian consolidation in the Palestinian territories. Dana writes regularly for publications such as Al-Araby al-Jadeed, The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, and Foreign Affairs. She currently works as a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and its sister institution, the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
