Full Name
Rabab Abdulhadi
Company
San Francisco State University
Speaker Bio
Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi is the founding Director and Senior scholar of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program at San Francisco State University and Principal Investigator of Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice. She is an internationally-known scholar and distinguished professor who is committed to community development and student engagement alongside her extensive academic work and publication and teaching schedule. She received her BA summa cum Laude in Special Honors Curriculum, Sociology, and Women’s Studies at Hunter College-CUNY, and her MA, MPhil and PhD from Yale University where she was awarded the prestigious Sterling Fellowship, a full scholarship, a dissertation fellowship, and the Teaching Excellence award, received for the first time by a Palestinian, Arab or Muslim.
Dr. Abdulhadi has taught at eight transnational sites of higher education including Yale University; CUNY Hunter College; the American University in Cairo (AUC); and Birzeit University, among others. She was a popular and highly valued visiting lecturer at Birzeit University’s Institute for Women’s Studies during her doctoral field research in Palestine, “Palestinianness in comparative perspective: Inclusionary Resistance, Exclusionary Citizenship”, that followed her undergraduate honors thesis, “The Limitations of Nationalism: Gender Dynamics and the Emergent Palestinian Feminist Discourses,” on which she drew her widely-cited article, “The Palestinian Women’s Autonomous Movement.” During her first post-PhD appointment at the American University in Cairo, she co-created the Graduate Certificate in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies, and organized and led the first AUC student delegation to any Arab country, leading to the formation of the Cairo to the Camps (C2C) program that lasted 10 years until the involvement of many of her former students in Tahrir Square and the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. During her postdoctoral fellowship at New York University, she co-created the BA program and Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies and co-organized a transnational feminist conference in collaboration with AUC’s Women and Gender Studies. As the first director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, she initiated and developed several projects such as Mapping Arab Diasporas, Intellectual and Pedagogical Institute in American and Arab American Studies for Palestinian and US Graduate Students in collaboration with Al-Quds University, Picturing Arabs and Muslims Film Series, and Arab and Arab American Writers Series.
She is widely published with over 80 articles, book chapters, anthologies and co-edited books. Her work has appeared in Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian and Spanish in academic journals (Feminist Studies; Women’s Studies Quarterly; International Feminist Journal of Politics; Gender and Society; Radical History Review; Peace Review; and Journal of Women’s History); anthologies (This Bridge We Call Home; New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life in America; Shifting Borders: American in the Middle East/North Africa; We Will Not Be Silenced; Righting Injustice: The Case for the Academic Boycott of Israel; With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and Empire; and Return to the Source); and social media posts newspapers and magazines, (Al-Shabaka; Jadaliyya and Mondoweiss). As a journalist based at the UN Headquarters for 10 years, she wrote for The Guardian, Al-Fajr; Womanews; Palestine Focus; Voice of Palestinian Women; Christianity and Crisis; Falasteen Al-Thahwra; Al-Hadaf; and Al-Hurriyah. A partial list of Dr. Abdulhadi’s publications and written works can be found here.
Dr. Abdulhadi has been recognized with scholarly and community honors and awards, most recently, the Day of Remembrance Consortium honored her with the Dr. Clifford I. Uyeda Humanitarian of the Year award. In October 2023, she was awarded the Angela Davis Award for Public Scholarship by the American Studies Association during the Association's annual conference in Montreal, Her awards include the Jere L. Bacharach Service Award from the Middle East Studies Association for her life’s commitment to Palestine Studies; the Georgina Smith Award by the American Association of University Professors; the Alex Odeh Award by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Lucius Walker Award by InterFaith Community Organizations/Pastors for Peace; Courage awards by Al-Awda: The Palestinian Right of Return Coalition and the National Convention of American Muslims for Palestine as well as Community Leader Award from the American Muslims for Palestine-Silicon Valley Muslim community. She was also honored by the Arab Feminist Union in Palestine, and named Bay Area Visionary by the National Women’s Studies Association, where she co-chairs Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine.
Dr. Abdulhadi is a co-founding Editorial Board member of Islamophobia Studies Journal and serves on the Editorial Colectiva for Chicana/Latina Studies Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. A policy Advisor for Al-Shabaka, she is a member of the Founding Collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She serves on the boards of Afro-Middle East Center, International Islamophobia Studies Research Association, and as mentor and visiting scholar at the Consortium de Recherche Inter et Transdisciplinaire en Proche et Moyen-Orient (Paris, France), Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme; Aix-Marseille University; Museum of the Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
Dr. Abdulhadi initiated numerous innovative scholarly projects and pedagogical curriculum, including Islamophobia: Gender, Sexuality and Racism, Living Archives: Third World, Indigenous and anti-Colonial Queer and Feminist International Solidarities. In response to the global pandemic, she initiated and co-organized major open classrooms webinars on Black Lives and Black Freedom, Abolition and Reparations, and Memorializing of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. These webinars attracted over 100,000 organic views of the AMED Facebook page, including the open classrooms on Palestine and Resistance narratives, censored by tech giants, pro-Israel lobby and university collusion. An international campaign has sprung up to oppose this censorship of academic freedom and silencing of Palestine.
At SFSU, Dr. Abdulhadi developed the AMED Studies as an Academic Minor with courses, such as Palestine, Islamophobia, civil liberties; gender and modernity; borders; colonialism, imperialism and resistance; Arab literature; Arab Media images; and Arab revolutions. She has served as the faculty advisor to (the short lived) Afghan Student Association; the Saudi Student Association, the historical General Union of Palestinian Students, Muslim Student Association and Muslim Women’s Studies Association. She created the Edward Said Scholarship with community support and established the collaborative MOU agreement with An-Najah National University, the first and only agreement SFSU has with any site in Arab and Muslim communities worldwide.
As a scholar-activist, Dr. Abdulhadi co-founded the California Scholars for Academic Freedom, US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and has co-organized the BDS campaigns within the Peace and Justice Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association. She also co-founded several community organizations such as the U.S. Branch of the General Union of Palestine Students; Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America, and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. She was the first Arab or Muslim to be elected to the Board of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NY CLU). She served on the Board of the Brecht Forum (formerly the Marxist School); co-Chaired the Third World Coalition of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and initiated and co-organized the 1985 national 26-city US tour on “Israel and South Africa: The Apartheid Connection?”, a monumental intervention in defining a Palestinian perspective on boycotts and sanctions along the lines of the anti-Apartheid movement. This builds on her earlier activism as a co-initiator of the Howard Beach Anti-Racist Campaign and the 500 Years of Genocide/500 Years of Resistance in 1992. Her activism includes building Palestinian support for Idle No More, Justice for Michael Brown, the Movement for Black Lives, and Standing Rock. She co-led “100 Years of Colonialism, 100 Years of Resistance,” the International Palestinian Campaign to commemorate the Balfour Declaration. She co-organized several Palestine delegations, including Indigenous and Women of Color Feminist Delegation, 2016 US Prisoner Solidarity, Labor and Academic Delegation, and 2018 (twice), 2019 and 2022 Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice.
Dr. Abdulhadi has taught at eight transnational sites of higher education including Yale University; CUNY Hunter College; the American University in Cairo (AUC); and Birzeit University, among others. She was a popular and highly valued visiting lecturer at Birzeit University’s Institute for Women’s Studies during her doctoral field research in Palestine, “Palestinianness in comparative perspective: Inclusionary Resistance, Exclusionary Citizenship”, that followed her undergraduate honors thesis, “The Limitations of Nationalism: Gender Dynamics and the Emergent Palestinian Feminist Discourses,” on which she drew her widely-cited article, “The Palestinian Women’s Autonomous Movement.” During her first post-PhD appointment at the American University in Cairo, she co-created the Graduate Certificate in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies, and organized and led the first AUC student delegation to any Arab country, leading to the formation of the Cairo to the Camps (C2C) program that lasted 10 years until the involvement of many of her former students in Tahrir Square and the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. During her postdoctoral fellowship at New York University, she co-created the BA program and Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies and co-organized a transnational feminist conference in collaboration with AUC’s Women and Gender Studies. As the first director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, she initiated and developed several projects such as Mapping Arab Diasporas, Intellectual and Pedagogical Institute in American and Arab American Studies for Palestinian and US Graduate Students in collaboration with Al-Quds University, Picturing Arabs and Muslims Film Series, and Arab and Arab American Writers Series.
She is widely published with over 80 articles, book chapters, anthologies and co-edited books. Her work has appeared in Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian and Spanish in academic journals (Feminist Studies; Women’s Studies Quarterly; International Feminist Journal of Politics; Gender and Society; Radical History Review; Peace Review; and Journal of Women’s History); anthologies (This Bridge We Call Home; New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life in America; Shifting Borders: American in the Middle East/North Africa; We Will Not Be Silenced; Righting Injustice: The Case for the Academic Boycott of Israel; With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and Empire; and Return to the Source); and social media posts newspapers and magazines, (Al-Shabaka; Jadaliyya and Mondoweiss). As a journalist based at the UN Headquarters for 10 years, she wrote for The Guardian, Al-Fajr; Womanews; Palestine Focus; Voice of Palestinian Women; Christianity and Crisis; Falasteen Al-Thahwra; Al-Hadaf; and Al-Hurriyah. A partial list of Dr. Abdulhadi’s publications and written works can be found here.
Dr. Abdulhadi has been recognized with scholarly and community honors and awards, most recently, the Day of Remembrance Consortium honored her with the Dr. Clifford I. Uyeda Humanitarian of the Year award. In October 2023, she was awarded the Angela Davis Award for Public Scholarship by the American Studies Association during the Association's annual conference in Montreal, Her awards include the Jere L. Bacharach Service Award from the Middle East Studies Association for her life’s commitment to Palestine Studies; the Georgina Smith Award by the American Association of University Professors; the Alex Odeh Award by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Lucius Walker Award by InterFaith Community Organizations/Pastors for Peace; Courage awards by Al-Awda: The Palestinian Right of Return Coalition and the National Convention of American Muslims for Palestine as well as Community Leader Award from the American Muslims for Palestine-Silicon Valley Muslim community. She was also honored by the Arab Feminist Union in Palestine, and named Bay Area Visionary by the National Women’s Studies Association, where she co-chairs Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine.
Dr. Abdulhadi is a co-founding Editorial Board member of Islamophobia Studies Journal and serves on the Editorial Colectiva for Chicana/Latina Studies Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. A policy Advisor for Al-Shabaka, she is a member of the Founding Collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She serves on the boards of Afro-Middle East Center, International Islamophobia Studies Research Association, and as mentor and visiting scholar at the Consortium de Recherche Inter et Transdisciplinaire en Proche et Moyen-Orient (Paris, France), Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme; Aix-Marseille University; Museum of the Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
Dr. Abdulhadi initiated numerous innovative scholarly projects and pedagogical curriculum, including Islamophobia: Gender, Sexuality and Racism, Living Archives: Third World, Indigenous and anti-Colonial Queer and Feminist International Solidarities. In response to the global pandemic, she initiated and co-organized major open classrooms webinars on Black Lives and Black Freedom, Abolition and Reparations, and Memorializing of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. These webinars attracted over 100,000 organic views of the AMED Facebook page, including the open classrooms on Palestine and Resistance narratives, censored by tech giants, pro-Israel lobby and university collusion. An international campaign has sprung up to oppose this censorship of academic freedom and silencing of Palestine.
At SFSU, Dr. Abdulhadi developed the AMED Studies as an Academic Minor with courses, such as Palestine, Islamophobia, civil liberties; gender and modernity; borders; colonialism, imperialism and resistance; Arab literature; Arab Media images; and Arab revolutions. She has served as the faculty advisor to (the short lived) Afghan Student Association; the Saudi Student Association, the historical General Union of Palestinian Students, Muslim Student Association and Muslim Women’s Studies Association. She created the Edward Said Scholarship with community support and established the collaborative MOU agreement with An-Najah National University, the first and only agreement SFSU has with any site in Arab and Muslim communities worldwide.
As a scholar-activist, Dr. Abdulhadi co-founded the California Scholars for Academic Freedom, US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and has co-organized the BDS campaigns within the Peace and Justice Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association. She also co-founded several community organizations such as the U.S. Branch of the General Union of Palestine Students; Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America, and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. She was the first Arab or Muslim to be elected to the Board of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NY CLU). She served on the Board of the Brecht Forum (formerly the Marxist School); co-Chaired the Third World Coalition of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and initiated and co-organized the 1985 national 26-city US tour on “Israel and South Africa: The Apartheid Connection?”, a monumental intervention in defining a Palestinian perspective on boycotts and sanctions along the lines of the anti-Apartheid movement. This builds on her earlier activism as a co-initiator of the Howard Beach Anti-Racist Campaign and the 500 Years of Genocide/500 Years of Resistance in 1992. Her activism includes building Palestinian support for Idle No More, Justice for Michael Brown, the Movement for Black Lives, and Standing Rock. She co-led “100 Years of Colonialism, 100 Years of Resistance,” the International Palestinian Campaign to commemorate the Balfour Declaration. She co-organized several Palestine delegations, including Indigenous and Women of Color Feminist Delegation, 2016 US Prisoner Solidarity, Labor and Academic Delegation, and 2018 (twice), 2019 and 2022 Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice.
