Beshara Doumani
University of California, Berkeley
Associate Professor, Department of History
Ph.D., Georgetown
bdoumani@berkeley.edu
My abiding interest from the very beginning has been 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. My 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). I try 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. Most of my work relies heavily on locally-produced archives such as family papers, material culture and, most of all, legal records of the Islamic courts (sijill). I am currently working on three projects that appear to have little to do with each other, but they all revolve around the ethics and politics of writing people into history:
- Academic Freedom in the United States
- Modern social History of the Palestinians
- Family history in the Eastern Mediterranean with a focus on relationships between property, gender, and Islamic Law (based on a comparative study of Tripoli, Lebanon and Nablus, Palestine, 1660-1860)