Irene Calis
Irene Calis is a de-colonial scholar, educator, and organizer in the department of Critical Race, Gender, & Culture Studies at American University, DC, where she is also the Director of Arab World Studies. Her research and activism, grounded in the Palestinian liberation struggle, focuses on emancipatory politics from the perspective of everyday life. Her current work on emancipatory futures situates the Palestinian struggle in a wider conversation with the global South, and in particular with indigenous-settler experience and intellectual thought. Calis holds a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics & Political Science.
Ismail Khalidi
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ismail Khalidi’s writing on Palestinian history, culture and politics range from plays and poetry to op-eds and commentary. He holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and authored the award-winning play Tennis in Nablus, which explores the Palestinians’ 1936-39 revolt against British Colonial rule. His work has been produced and read at theatres and Universities around the country including Atlanta’s Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre, which premiered Tennis in Nablus, and the Culture Project, which will produce the New York premiere in 2013. Khalidi’s writing has also appeared in The Daily Beast, American Theatre Magazine, The Nation, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution.
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.
Hatem Bazian
Hatem Bazian is a senior lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and is also a visiting Professor in Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s College of California and adviser to Berkeley’s Religion, Politics and Globalization Center as well as Academic Affairs Chair at Zaytuna College of California. He also founded Berkeley’s Center for the Study and Documentation of Islamophobia, a research unit dedicated to the systematic study of Othering Islam and Muslims. He is also Chairman of the Board of American Muslims for Palestine.
Halah Ahmad
Halah Ahmad is a policy researcher, writer, and policy communications expert. Most recently, she led legislative affairs as VP for Policy at the Jain Family Institute, an applied social science research institute based in New York City. Halah also served as the US Policy Fellow for Al-Shabaka, and has conducted strategic policy research for government agencies and NGOs in Greece, Albania, Germany, Palestine, and the US. Halah received her Masters in Public Policy from Cambridge University as a Harvard-Cambridge scholar. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vox, The LA Times, The Hill, USA Today and other outlets.
Hani Faris
Hani Faris is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He previously served at various universities, including Kuwait, Harvard, McGill, and Simon Fraser. He has written many academic articles and his books include Beyond the Lebanese Civil War. He has written more than twenty book chapters and over forty academic articles on such topics as Arab nationalism, the Middle East in world politics, Zionism, Lebanese politics, history of the Palestinian issue, and Third World development. Faris serves on the editorial board of Contemporary Arab Affairs and is president of the Board of Trans Arab Research Institute, (TARI).
Fateh Azzam
Fateh Azzam is the Director of the newly established Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University in Beirut, and Senior Policy Fellow at AUB’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy. Previously, he directed al-Haq (1987-1995), was Human Rights Officer at the Ford Foundation (1996-2003), Director of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo (2003-2006) and Middle East regional Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights until July 2012. He is co-founder and former Board Chair of the Arab Human Rights Fund.
Grace Said
Grace Said is a long-time advocate of Palestinian human rights. She is a member of the Steering Committee of Friends of Sabeel, North America and treasurer of the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace. She has in the past served on the boards of Trans-Arab Research Institute and the Arab-American University Graduates. In 2009 she was a co-founder of Al-Shabaka and also organized a major Sabeel conference in Washington, DC.
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.
