Beshara Doumani
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Beshara Doumani is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley specializing in Middle Eastern history. A frequent commentator on Middle East affairs appearing regularly in various media, he is amongst a handful of academics that also serve as public intellectuals in bridging the gap and furthering greater understanding between the Middle East and the West by providing thoughtful and nuanced analysis.
Doumani received his bachelors degree from Kenyon College in Ohio in 1977. He earned an M.A. from Georgetown University in 1980 from where he would also receive his Ph.D. in 1990. Since 1990 he has been a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley.
His interest lies in "recovering the history of social groups, places, and time periods that have been silenced or erased by conventional scholarship on the Modern Middle East." His specialty "is the social and cultural history of peasants, merchants, artisans, and women who live in the provincial regions of the Arab East during the late Ottoman period (18th and 19th centuries)." His work attempts to "paint a live portrait of everyday life through studying family history, the political economy of urban-rural relations, and connections between gender and property." Much of his work "relies heavily on locally-produced archives such as family papers, material culture and, most of all, legal records of the Islamic courts (sijill)." He is currently working on two projects:
1. The Palestinians: A Social History 2. Family Visions: Property, Gender, and the Praxis of Islamic Law (based on a comparative study of Tripoli, Lebanon and Nablus, Palestine)
His latest work is Academic Freedom after September 11, an anthology of essays by various academics on effects of September 11 upon the academy, which can be purchased via Amazon.com.