Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Saed Atshan is a Palestinian anthropologist born in the United States in 1984, and has worked as a professor at Emory University and Swarthmore College .
His life
Saed Atshan was born in the United States in 1984 to a Palestinian family originally from the West Bank . He returned with his family to Palestine to live in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, where he attended Friends School. During his high school years, he participated in the Second Palestinian Intifada . In 2002, he moved to the United States to attend Swarthmore College, from which he received his undergraduate degree, graduating in 2006. Saed Atshan later earned a doctorate in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University , and then joined Brown University to complete his postdoctoral research.
Saed Atshan began his volunteer work in the late 2000s when he worked as a college counselor and mentor to senior students at Friends School in Ramallah, whose students included Kinan Abdul Hamid and Hisham Awartani, who were the victims of the attempted murder in the Burlington incident . Saed Atshan is a Quaker, a peace activist, and is gay .
His career
Saed Atshan has been a professor at Swarthmore College since 2015, and has served as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology and a visiting scholar in Middle Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley, during the 2020–2021 academic year. In 2020, Atshan was named one of 40 Arab American Founding Figures Under 40. Atshan was appointed a professor at Emory University in 2021, and in January 2022, he became the university’s first tenured Palestinian professor. Atshan currently serves as an associate professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology at Emory University.
His political positions
On February 3, 2017, Saed Atshan was banned from lecturing at Friends Central School in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania , after some parents complained about his support for the BDS movement . Two teachers who had invited Atshan to speak at the school’s graduation ceremony on behalf of the school’s Palestine Peace and Equality Club were also suspended and placed on indefinite leave. Although the school later re-invited him to lecture at the school, Atshan declined, saying he would not return to lecture at the school unless the school reinstated the suspended teachers. In 2018, Saed Atshan was cancelled from giving a lecture at the Jewish Museum in Berlin after comments he made in 2014 in which he described Israel as an apartheid state surfaced . The lecture, which Atshan had planned to give as part of the museum’s exhibition on Jerusalem, was titled “Being Gay and Palestinian in East Jerusalem .”
In October 2023, Saed Atshan criticized US President Joe Biden's position and the US government's support for the genocide and massacres committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip during its invasion of the Strip following Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa .
His writings
Saed Atshan has published a number of books, publications and academic research. The following table shows his most important publications
Queer Palestine and the Empire of Criticism
The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians
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Achievements and Awards
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