Sa’ed Atshan

About Sa’ed Atshan

Dr. Sa’ed Atshan is Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College.

Previously, he was on faculty at Emory University, served as an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College, as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Senior Research Scholar in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

He earned a Joint PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies (2013) and MA in Social Anthropology (2010) from Harvard University, a Master in Public Policy (MPP) (2008) from the Harvard Kennedy School, and BA (2006) from Swarthmore College. 

He is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020). Atshan is also the coauthor, with Katharina Galor (Judaic Studies, Brown University), of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020). The German translation of The Moral Triangle is entitled Israelis, Palästinenser und Deutsche in Berlin: Geschichten einer komplexen Beziehung (De Gruyter, 2021). 

His book, Paradoxes of Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories, is under contract with Stanford University Press in their Anthropology of Policy Series. And his forthcoming coedited volume (with Katharina Galor), Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema, was published with Bloomsbury in the fall of 2022. 

Atshan has recently embarked on two new projects. One is researching the convergent and divergent experiences of African-American and Palestinian Quakers, with an emphasis on the intersection of race and Christianity in the United States and Israel/Palestine. This project is entitled, “Can the Subaltern Quaker Speak?: Alienation and Belonging among Black and Palestinian Friends.” The other, “Queer Imaginaries and the Re-Making of the Modern Middle East,” is in collaboration with Phillip Ayoub (Diplomacy and World Affairs, Occidental College). Atshan and Ayoub are researching LGBTQ activism across the Middle East and North Africa region.

He has been awarded multiple grants and fellowships, including from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Open Society Foundations, National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. He is also the recipient of a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and a Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace. 

Dr. Atshan currently serves on the Corporation of Haverford College, the Board of the Association for Middle East Anthropology (AMEA) of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Board of the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), and as the Policy and Law Book Reviews Editor for the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). He previously served on the Editorial Committee of the Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS), and was an elected Board member for the Middle East Section (MES) of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).