Visitor Talk - Issam Nassar

The presentation will focus on the relationship between history and personal and family albums in the case of the pre-1948 Palestine. With the destruction of Palestinian society around the time Israel was created, a large number of archival materials was lost. Without a state of their own, the Palestinians were left with mostly memories of their lives before they became refugees. In my presentation, I will argue that photographic albums constitute personal archives that narrates history from a familial perspective as well as preserves visual evidence of a life lost.

Issam Nassar is a professor of Middle East History at Illinois State University, currently at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar. He has written on the histories of Ottoman Palestine, photography of the region, and on memoirs. He is the co-editor of Jerusalem  Quarterly, and his forthcoming co-authored publication, Camera Palaestina, is due to come out in June this year from  California University Press.