Notes on the Study of Palestinian Histories: A Roundtable Discussion

From 2010 to 2022, the American Historical Association Annual Meetings averaged one paper per year that focused on modern Palestinian social, cultural, and/or political history. Over the last three years, we have seen a rise in the number of papers and roundtables on Palestinian history at the AHA Annual Meeting, reflecting the growing interest by scholars and students alike for a deeper conversation on how to study Palestinian history in Western academic institutions.

This roundtable engages with the challenges, opportunities, and evolving methodologies in the study of Palestinian histories. Long marginalized and contested, Palestinian history offers rich empirical and theoretical insights into questions of colonialism and imperialism, migration, resistance, identity, and social and state formation.

Bringing together historians working across many temporal, geographic, and methodological spheres, the roundtable will reflect on the state of the field and explore innovative ways to write Palestinian histories amidst archival absences, fragmentation, and institutional silencing. The roundtable participants will consider how to navigate the scarcity and dispersion of sources and the dominance of settler-colonial narratives in historical production. They will discuss how historians can recover voices, memories, and experiences of Palestinians.

Participants will pay special attention to interdisciplinary approaches that situate Palestinian histories within global frameworks, linking them to histories of decolonization, revolution, migration, and solidarity. They will explore how new digital and public history tools can help overcome physical and political barriers to research while amplifying Palestinian voices in ways that can reach wider audiences.

This roundtable invites participants and attendees to reflect on how the study of Palestinian histories can inform broader debates about power, memory, presentism and justice in historical scholarship. By addressing the stakes of writing histories in the context of colonial violence and genocide, this conversation seeks to foster a more inclusive and critical historiographical practice that resists erasures at multiple scales, and centers Palestinians themselves. In doing so, it challenges historians to expand the boundaries of their work, rethinking both the methods and ethics in the study of histories under conditions of settler colonialism, statelessness, and erasure.