Salim Tamari

Who is Salim Tamari?

Salim Tamari is the director of the Institute of Palestine Studies and an adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, has called Tamari "the preeminent Palestinian historical sociologist."

Tamari was born in the ancient port city of Jaffa in 1945. When he was three years old, in April 1948, his family fled Jaffa when it was attacked by Jewish paramilitary groups as part of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Tamari studied at Birzeit College in the West Bank and then received a B.A. in politics from Drew University in New Jersey, United States. He later received an M.A. in sociology from the University of New Hampshire and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Manchester.

Tamari has been a sociologist at Birzeit University since 1971. In 1994, he was appointed director of the Institute of Jerusalem Studies, an affiliate of the Beirut-based Institute for Palestine Studies that publishes the Arabic journal Jerusalem Quarterly. He has also served on the refugee committee in the multilateral peace talks held following the Madrid Conference of 1991. He has been a visiting fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, and has been a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley, New York University; Cornell University, and the University of Chicago. He was a 2008 Eric Lane Fellow at the University of Cambridge and is a lecturer in Mediterranean Studies at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice.