PARC - Palestinian American Research Center

Membership

Who we are...

Board of Directors

PARC Executive Director: Penelope Mitchell
Penelope Mitchell has worked as a consultant in international development for 14 years. Her activities have centered on conceptualizing and writing large grant proposals for training programs in developing countries. The most recent projects include bringing Diaspora Sudanese back home to train colleagues in education and medical fields, ongoing work in Palestine to develop higher education initiatives, activities in Armenia to revitalize the countryside through programs centered on youth, and a worldwide initiative in democracy training. Prior to her work as an independent consultant, she spent 10 years at the Academy for Educational Development managing human resource development activities in Botswana, Swaziland, India, Honduras and the Caribbean. She worked in financial management for Education Development Center, was logistics coordinator in Kenya for Earthwatch, and served as a department office manager at New York University. She also owned and operated a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts for five years. She has a master’s degree from New York University in TESOL, a bachelor’s degree in history from Stanford University, has studied in Italy, France and Mexico, and is working on a PhD in anthropology at American University. She has published and presented papers on the topic of reentry of students into the workplace after long-term study abroad among numerous other topics related to the management of training programs. She is editor of an upcoming handbook for foreign universities, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, on how to develop and manage programs for visiting U.S. students and create partnerships with U.S. universities. Married for 21 years to a Palestinian, she and her family have been frequent visitors to the West Bank.

PARC Palestine Director: Dr. Hadeel Qazzaz
Hadeel Qazzaz was born in Gaza Shati refugee camp and has lived in Ramallah since 1997. She is a specialist in education, gender and development. She received her Ed.D. from Leeds University with a thesis on adult non-formal education in developing countries, using the case of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Qazzaz has published research reports on women’s political participation, violence against women and women’s empowerment. She is lately involved in gender perspectives to issues of reform and good governance, including gender responsive adaptation of the Transparency International Source Book into Arabic, research examining civic attitudes of Palestinian high school students, and contributed to developing curriculum on civic education for Palestinian school children age 12-15. She also contributed to Palestinian Human Development Reports, the Palestine National Poverty Report, the Palestine Time-use Survey and reports on the right to education in the Palestinian context. Since 1999 she worked as a program coordinator and deputy director of the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, Arab Middle East office. This enriching experience has developed her capacity in project management, monitoring and evaluation and fundraising. It has enabled her to work closely with researchers and activists from many Arab countries and Germany. She is an activist in the Palestinian women’s movement and an active member in the Palestinian civil society movement. She is involved in different types of cultural dialogue and exchange including dialogue between Europe and the Middle East. She has organized and participated in many regional and international conferences addressing issues of development, women’s rights and democratization processes.

PARC PRESIDENT: Dr. Peter Gubser was President of ANERA in Washington, D.C. from 1977 to 2007. An author of many books and articles on the Middle East, especially on Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and related social and economic issues, he is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Prior to joining ANERA, he was Assistant Representative with the Ford Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon and Amman, Jordan (1974-77); an Associate Research Scientist with the American Institute for Research in Washington, D.C. (1972-1974); and a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, England (1970-72). He received his Ph.D. in Social Science from Oxford University, St. Antony’s College (1970), his M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut (1966), and his B.A. in Political Science from Yale University (1964).

PARC TREASURER: Dr. Charles Butterworth, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park specializes in the study of medieval Islamic political philosophy. His publications include critical editions of most of the Middle Commentaries written by Averroes on Aristotle’s logic; translations of books and treatises by Averroes, Alfarabi and Alrazi, as well as Maimonides; and studies of different aspects of the political teaching of these and other thinkers in the ancient, medieval and modern tradition of philosophy. Having received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, Prof. Butterworth has also studied at the University of Ayn Shams in Egypt, the University of Bordeaux, and the University of Nancy in France (receiving a doctorate in philosophy from the latter). A long-standing interest in the Palestinian-Israeli debate led to his involvement in CEEPAT (Continuing Education and Extension Project for Palestinians and Teachers on the West Bank and in Gaza) designed to sharpen thinking skills and increase general learning.

PARC SECRETARY: Dr. Julie Peteet is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Director of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Louisville. Her research has focused on Palestinian displacement, refugee camps, space and identity, and more recently the policy of closure in the West Bank. She has authored two books: Gender in Crisis; Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (Columbia University Press, 1991) and Landscape of Hope and Despair. Palestinian Refugee Camps (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). She has published in a variety of journals including Signs, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Survival, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Middle East Report as well as contributed numerous chapters in edited volumes. Her research has been funded by SSRC, Wenner-Gren, Fulbright, the Mellon Foundation, CAORC, and PARC. She serves on the Editorial Board of MERIP and was an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.

Member: Dr. Nathan J. Brown is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, where he directs the Institute for Middle East Studies. He has written on Palestinian politics, institution building, and legal and constitutional development. Brown’s most recent book, Resuming Arab Palestine (University of California Press, 2003) presents research on Palestinian society and governance after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. Brown also serves as Nonresident Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was previously a scholar in residence at the Middle East Institute. In 2002 and 2003, he was a member of the international advisory committee on drafting the Palestinian constitution. Brown has also served as consultant to the UNDP's program on governance in the Arab world and to a number of NGOs active in the Arab world. Besides his book on Palestinian politics, Brown has written Constitutions in a Non-Constitutional World: Arab Basic Laws and Prospects for Accountable Government, (SUNY Press, 2001), The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Arab States of the Gulf (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt (Yale University Press, 1990). He received a BA from the University of Chicago and his MA and PhD from Princeton University.

Member: Dr. Rochelle Davis is an assistant professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan in 2002 in cultural anthropology and modern Arabic literature. Her BA is from the University of California, Davis in art history. She has studied and conducted research in the Arab world for over ten years: three years in Palestine/Israel, four years in Jordan, and three years in Egypt. Her research focuses on Palestinian local history and memory. She is working on a book manuscript on the village memorial books that Palestinians have written about their villages that were destroyed in 1948. Her collection of the books numbers over 100, gathered from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, and inside Israel. In addition, she is working on scholarly articles based on oral histories she collected from Palestinians who lived in Jerusalem before 1948, and she has also published an article on British Mandate education and the Arab College in Jerusalem.

Member: Dr. Beshara Doumani is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of Kenyon College, he received his M.A. in Arab Studies and his Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. He writes on the social and cultural history of provincial life of the Arab East in Ottoman times; on everyday life of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation; and on academic freedom. His books include Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900; Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property and Gender (Ed.); and Academic Freedom After September 11 (Ed.). He has edited special issues of the Journal of Palestine Studies and the Jerusalem Quarterly. For details and downloads, visit history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Doumani.

Member: Dr. Rhoda Kanaaneh is a visiting scholar at New York University's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. She has taught anthropology and gender and sexuality studies at New York University and American University in Washington, DC, and has held fellowships at Harvard, the European University Institute and Columbia. She is the author of the award winning book Birthing the Nation (University of California Press 2002). Her books On the Edge of Security: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military (forthcoming from Stanford University Press) and Palestinians in Israel Revisited with Isis Nusair (forthcoming from SUNY press) were both supported in part by PARC. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies.

Member: Dr. Ann Mosely Lesch, dean of humanities and social sciences professor at the American University in Cairo was formerly a professor in the Department of Political Science and the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at Villanova University and past president of the Middle East Studies Association in North America (MESA). She has published five books on Palestine: Politics in Palestine, 1917-1939 (1979), Political Perceptions of the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (1980), Israel, Egypt and the Palestinians, with Mark Tessler (1989), Transition to Palestinian Self-Government (1992), and Origins and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, with Dan Tschirgi (1998; 2nd edition, 2006). She worked in Jerusalem for the American Friends Service Committee (1974-77), supervised a grants program on the West Bank for the Ford Foundation (1977-84), and conducted research in Gaza for Universities Field Staff International, while living in Cairo (1984-87). She served as editor of MESA’s book review Bulletin (1997-99) and administered a federally funded exchange program between the business faculties of Villanova and Bethlehem universities (1994-99). She is also a member of the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch/Middle East and a member of the Middle East peace education advisory committee for the American Friends Service Committee.

Member: Dr. Philip Mattar is the former Executive Director of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C., an independent center for scholarly research and publications, and the former Associate Editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Mattar will be a Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson Center September 2001-August 2002. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in Middle Eastern history. Dr. Mattar is the author of The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement, revised edition, Columbia University Press, 1992, and has published in Foreign Policy, Middle East Journal and Middle Eastern Studies. He was a Fulbright scholar and has taught history at Yale and Georgetown Universities. He is a member of the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch/Middle East. Dr. Mattar is co-editor, with Richard Bulliet and Reeva Simon, of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East, published by Macmillan Publishing Company in 1996, and is editor of Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, published by Facts-On-file in 2000.

Member: Dr. Jennifer C. Olmsted has long been interested in the Middle East and in the economics of conflict, having grown up in Beirut, Lebanon. Her PhD thesis, completed at the University of California, Davis in 1994, examined the gendering of Palestinian education, employment and migration patterns in the Bethlehem area, in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war. She has held a number of positions in both academia and the policy world and is currently Associate Professor of Economics at Drew University in Madison, NJ, USA. She continues to focus her research on Palestine, but has also written about the Iraqi, Egyptian and US economies. Her publications have appeared in a number of book volumes and journals, including World Development, Journal of Development Studies, Feminist Economics, Research in Middle East Economics, Middle East Report, and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. In addition to serving on the PARC board, Dr. Olmsted is also currently on the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the International Association for Feminist Economics boards.

Member: Dr. Najwa al-Qattan is associate professor of history at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy from AUB, a M.A. in Philosophy from Georgetown, and a Ph.D. in History and Middle East Studies from Harvard University, and is the recipient of awards and grants from SSRC, MESA, TSA, and the NEH. She has published articles on the Ottoman Muslim court, the Jews and Christians of the empire, and the Ottoman Great War in journals and books, including the International Journal of Middle East Studies and Comparative Studies in Society and History. She has also served on award committees for the Middle East Studies Association and the Turkish Studies Association, and is currently book review editor for pre-modern history at the MESA Bulletin.

Member: Dr. Charles D. Smith is professor of modern Middle East history in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona. A graduate of Williams College he received his M.A. in Middle East studies from Harvard and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. Formerly a member of the history department at San Diego State University, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, George Mason University, Virginia Military Institute, and was the National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been a member of the faculty at the University of Arizona since 1994 and formerly headed the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Smith has lived and traveled widely in the Middle East. He held a Fulbright Scholarship to Egypt and was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as having engaged in other research trips to the region, especially to Egypt and to Tunisia. He is a former President of the American Research Center in Egypt [1996-1999]. Professor Smith is the author of two books, Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt [1983], and Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict [1988, Bedford/St Martins], the 4th edition of which appeared in 2001. He has also published numerous articles and book reviews and has lectured widely on matters pertaining to the Islamic world and the Middle East.

PARC’s Palestinian Advisory Committee:

Ibrahim Dakkak (Chair) is a Palestinian community leader, engineer, and developmental and political analyst who has been deeply involved in numerous Palestinian institution-building projects as well as Palestinian political initiatives. A resident of Jerusalem, he currently chairs the Birzeit University Board of Trustees and the Palestinian Center for Micro-Projects Development, which provides valuable assistance to small businesses and to early childhood educational projects. Dakkak is Deputy Chairman of the Faisal Husseini Foundation and serves on the board of the Jerusalem Prize committee for the Shoman Foundation. He is a consultant to the Ministry of Education and to other Palestinian developmental projects. He is a founder of the Arab Thought Forum, which he chaired until 1992.

Hiba I. Husseini , managing partner of the law firm Husseini and Husseini, provides counsel on commercial issues to foreign and Palestinian firms and has provided strategy advice and legal drafting services to various agencies of the Palestinian Authority in the course of developing legal structures related to economic development. Husseini's publications include guides to investing, commercial law in the territories, and Palestinian economic policy development. She served as legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating teams in the Oslo, Stockholm, and Camp David processes. Husseini serves on the boards of numerous Palestinian companies and non-profit organizations, including vice chair of the Palestine Securities Exchange, chair of al-Mustakbal Foundation, member of the board of trustees of al-Najah University, and member of the Palestinian preparatory committee to the World Trade Organization. Husseini, who gained her J.D. from Georgetown University in 1992, is a member of the Pennsylvania and Palestine Bar Associations .

Mouin Rabbani was born in the Netherlands and studied history and international Relations in the United States and Great Britain. After working in the human rights and development fields in Palestine, he served as Palestine Director for PARC from 2000 to 2002, after which he joined the Advisory Board of the Palestine office. Currently, Rabbani is Senior Middle East Analyst with the International Crisis Group in Amman, Jordan, specializing on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has published widely on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict; his writings have appeared in Journal of Palestine Studies , Middle East International , Middle East Report , Third World Quarterly , The Nation , and other publications.

Nadim N. Rouhana , visiting associate professor of international diplomacy at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, in 2003-2004, has taught sociology at Tel Aviv University since 2001 and taught in the graduate program in dispute resolution at the University of Massachusetts (Boston) from 1997 to 2001. He also co-chairs the seminar on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Harvard University. Rouhana's publications include Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (Yale University Press, 1997) and numerous articles on citizenship, democracy, and inter-group conflict in edited volumes and journals such as the Journal of Applied Social Psychology .

Jacqueline Sfeir , dean of education at Bethlehem University, received her Ph.D. from University of North Colorado. She has worked extensively in the field of early childhood education and has published assessments of the achievement-levels of students on the West Bank. Sfeir and Julia Gilkes recently prepared a manual for early childhood educators and trainers, co-sponsored by Save the Children (UK) and the Arab Resource Collective, based on research and field testing in Lebanon and Palestine. In 2001 she was appointed to a five year term as a member of the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

Raji Sourani has directed the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (Gaza) since 1995, which focuses on human rights and the development of a democratic society. He previously directed the Gaza Centre for Rights and Law, founded in 1991, and he continues to represent clients through his law firm, founded in 1983. A graduate of the law faculties of Beirut and Alexandria universities, Sourani received a joint laureate from the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial for Human Rights (1991) with Israeli lawyer Avigdor Feldman, the human rights award from the French Republic (1995), the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Outstanding Achievements in Human Rights (2002), and the International Service Human Rights Award (2003). He is currently a commissioner with the International Commission of Jurists, vice president of the Federation Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l'Homme, and member of the board of the Arab Organisation for Human Rights (Cairo).