Interview with History Professor Sherene Seikaly

Transcript of the interview:

Sherene Seikaly is an Assistant Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo. She earned a PhD in the departments of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University in 2007, an MA at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and a B.A. at the University of California, San Diego. Before joining AUC, Professor Seikaly was the Qatar Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University (2007-2008) and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Middle East in Europe Program at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2008-2009).

Tell us about yourself, how did you decide to become a historian?

I’ll tell u a little bit about my self. I was born in Beirut, Lebanon during the civil war to Palestinian parents who were expelled as children from Palestine in 1948 and I grew up in the states. My first memories were really ones of civil war in Lebanon. And after I did undergraduate studies at UC San Diego I went back to Lebanon and I did work in the Palestinian refugee camps and non-profit work for about four years in Lebanon and I think after that when I went back to do graduate work and I decided that the on-profit world wasn’t really helping me to do new things, there was like a ceiling for me in that field. I moved towards graduate work and academic work and then my journey towards history was kind of accidental in many ways but then as I got more familiar with what I could do as a historian especially as a historian of Palestine I became very committed and convinced of it.

And that brings us to our next questions, how has the fact that you are of Palestinian descent affect the way you viewed things and your approach to work?

I think that from the very beginning very sort of because my family, in part because of the civil war but also in part because of how my family experienced being Palestinian in Lebanon, even though we had citizenship, because the Palestinian Christians got citizenship in Lebanon. My family sort of raised me from the very beginning with the kind of political background and being unable to go to Palestine and be in Palestine and be in one place with the rest of the family, so that was sort of one of the first things that formed me as a person, my very first memories are of that. And then what I think happened when I went to the states was because I understood that the way that the Palestinian story being told in the media wasn’t accurate, and so I began questioning the way politics were represented more broadly. So it helped make connections with sort of the plight of the Native Americans in the United States and African Americans and I began making connections sort of from an early age. Today I think the approach is one of commitment to justice and I like to think that’s not just about Palestine but more general, but it is definitely informed by that commitment to justice in Palestine.

Did you ever face difficulties in your field or while you were studying just because of whom you are?

No not while I was studying, while I was studying I had a very supportive group of advisors and folks around me that were supporting me and helping me, but when I started sort of the job application process, because I had been doing political work for about ten years, I mean even longer, especially my time in New York began with a kind of, the second intifada, and that was the time of real political activism, and I think when started going out onto the job market, the combination of having done political work and doing something on Palestine and being Palestinian, was a challenge definitely, I think people were afraid of the possible controversies that having me on-campus would inspire.

I heard that you are working on a manuscript, its a work in progress, so can you tell us a little bit about this.

Sure, it’s called Meatless Days: Consumption and Capitalism in Palestine, its based on the dissertation, which tries to look at basically the ideas that the way we’ve looked at history, Palestinian history, before 1948 has simplified the social history of that period. So people have looked at that history as one of either there are these kind of decadent notable elites or honourable and ignorant peasants, and one of the things that my work tries to do is say that there was something else going on in the middle, that there was a middle class, that they had ideas about capitalism, that they had ideas about what it meant to have a healthy body and economy and a nation. And one of the reason I think it’s important, is because it allows us to look at liberalism and capitalism critically as a historical phenomenon.