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Rashid Khalidi

Personal Info

  • Country of residence: United States
  • Gender: Male
  • Born in: 1948
  • Age: 68
  • Curriculum vitae :

Information

Rashid Ismail Khalidi (born 1948) is a Palestinian American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. He also is known for serving as editor of the scholarly journal Journal of Palestine Studies. Khalidi was born in New York City, New York. Khalidi is the son of Ismail Khalidi and the nephew of Husayin al-Khalidi. He is the father of playwright Ismail Khalidi. He grew up in New York City, where his father, a Saudi citizen of Palestinian origins who was born in Jerusalem, worked for the United Nations. Khalidi's mother, a Lebanese-American born in the United States, was an interior decorator. Khalidi attended the United Nations International School.

In 1970, Khalidi received a B.A. from Yale University, where he was a member of the Wolf's Head Society. He then received a D. Phil. from Oxford University in 1974. Between 1976 and 1983, Khalidi "was teaching full time as an Assistant Professor in the Political Studies and Public Administration Dept. at the American University of Beirut, published two books and several articles, and also was a research fellow at the independent Institute for Palestine Studies". He has also taught at the Lebanese University.

Khalidi became politically active in Beirut, where he resided through the 1982 Lebanon War. "I was deeply involved in politics in Beirut" in the 1970s, he said in an interview. Khalidi was cited in the media during this period, sometimes as an official with the Palestinian News Service, Wafa, or directly with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. However, Khalidi has denied that he was a PLO spokesman, stating that he "often spoke to journalists in Beirut, who usually cited me without attribution as a well-informed Palestinian source. If some misidentified me at the time, I am not aware of it." Subsequently sources disagreed as to the nature or existence of Khalidi's official relationship with the organization.

Returning to America, Khalidi spent two years teaching at Columbia University before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1987, where he spent eight years as a professor and director of both the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago. During the Gulf War, while teaching at Chicago, Khalidi emerged "as one of the most influential commentators from within Middle Eastern Studies". In 2003 he joined the faculty of Columbia University, where he currently serves as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies. He has also taught at Georgetown University.

He is member of the Board of Sponsors of The Palestine–Israel Journal, a publication founded by Ziad Abuzayyad and Victor Cygielman, prominent Palestinian and Israeli journalists. He is founding trustee of The Center for Palestine Research and Studies. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Khalidi's research covers primarily the history of the modern Middle East. He focuses on the countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, with an eye to the emergence of various national identities and the role played by external powers in their development. He also researches the impact of the press on forming new senses of community, the role of education in the construction of political identity, and in the way narratives have developed over the past centuries in the region. Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown, describes Khalidi as "preeminent in his field". He served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 1994 and is currently the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Much of Khalidi's scholarly work in the 1990s focused on the historical construction of nationalism in the Arab world. Drawing on the work of theorist Benedict Anderson who described nations as "imagined communities", he does not posit primordial national identities, but argues that these nations have legitimacy and rights. In Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997), he places the emergence of Palestinian national identity in the context of Ottoman and British colonialism as well as the early Zionist effort in the Levant. Palestinian Identity won the Middle East Studies Association's top honor, the Albert Hourani Prize as best book of 1997. 

Khalidi has written dozens of scholarly articles on Middle East history and politics, as well as op-ed pieces in many U.S. newspapers. He has also been a guest on radio and TV shows including All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, Worldview, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, and Nightline, and has appeared on the BBC, the CBC, France Inter and the Voice of America. He served as president of the American Committee on Jerusalem, now known as the American Task Force on Palestine.


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Achievements and Awards

Published works:

British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914. Ithaca Press for St. Antony's College, 1980.

Palestine and the Gulf (Co-editor), Institute for Palestine Studies, 1982.

Under Siege: PLO Decision-making during the 1982 War. Columbia University Press, 1986.

The Origins of Arab Nationalism (Co-editor), Columbia University Press, 1991.

Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1997.

Eugene L. Rogan & Avi Shlaim, ed. (2007) [1st ed. 2001]. "The Palestinians and 1948: the underlying causes of failure". The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-69934-1.

Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, Beacon Press, 2004.

The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Beacon Press. 2006. ISBN 0-8070-0308-5.

Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, Beacon Press, 2009.

Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, Beacon Press, 2013.

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