Past Fellows

2024 FMEP Non-Resident Palestinian Fellows

Rania Batrice is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, an activist and strategist for progressive change, a public relations specialist, and a political consultant. Rania has worked as a Democratic operative for over twenty years, lending her expertise across political, non-profit, legislative strategy and crisis management both in the United States and around the world. For Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run for president, she served as Iowa Communications Director, the National Director of Surrogates and as Deputy Campaign Manager. In addition to Rania’s expertise in strategy, policy and communications, her portfolio includes over 15 years of experience in conflict resolution, mediation, and organizational development. Her firm, Batrice and Associates, has worked for social justice through a variety of avenues, collaborating with organizations including Human Rights Watch, the Arab American Institute, March for Our Lives, Color of Change, March For Science, Sunrise Movement, and NDN Collective and more. Rania has been a featured speaker for a wide range of events, including addressing climate change at the Social Good Summit, the UN Youth Climate Summit and the UN General Assembly. Rania has received numerous accolades and awards for her work in the progressive movement, including the “Exceptional Woman of Excellence” award presented by the World Economic Forum and the “Woman of Purpose” award presented by the Purpose Project.

Watch or listen to Ms. Batrice’s FMEP programs, including: 

 

Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA (2022), and wrote her dissertation Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine on the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures while centering indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Her work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and occupied Palestine.

Watch or listen to Dr. Joudah’s FMEP programs, including: 

2023 FMEP Non-Resident Palestinian Fellows

Dr. Yara M. Asi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management and Informatics and a Visiting Scholar at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University in her capacity as Co-Director of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights. She is also a Non-resident Fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Scholar to the West Bank, and the co-chair of the Palestine Health Justice Working Group in the American Public Health Association. She previously served as the Fall 2021 US Fellow at Al Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network. Her research agenda focuses on global health, human rights, and development in fragile populations. She has also worked with Amnesty International USA and the Palestinian American Research Center on policy and outreach issues. She has presented at multiple national and international conferences on topics related to global health, food security, health informatics, and women in healthcare, and has published extensively on health and well-being in fragile and conflict-affected populations in journal articles and book chapters. She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, +972 Magazine, The New Arab, and The Conversation, and has been featured on Al Jazeera, The World, and other outlets. Her forthcoming book with Johns Hopkins University Press will examine war as a public health crisis.

Watch or listen to Dr. Asi’s FMEP programs, including: 

Rabea Eghbariah is a human rights attorney completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School. He worked as an appellate public defender before joining the Haifa-based Adalah Legal Center, where he argued major Palestinian civil and political rights cases. Rabea published on various subjects relating to Palestinians and Israeli law, including the censorship of online speech, the legal land regime, and the criminalization of Palestinian foragers. His writings appeared in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, the Law and Political Economy Project, and the Journal of Palestine Studies, among others. Rabea previously served as an executive article editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and currently serves as an editorial member of Jadaliyya’s Palestine page.

Watch or listen to Mr. Eghbariah’s FMEP programs, including: 

2022 Palestinian Non-Resident Fellows

Dr. Maha Nassar is an associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, where she specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of the modern Arab world. Her award-winning book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), examines how Palestinian intellectuals connected to global decolonization movements during the mid-twentieth century. A 2018 Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project, Dr. Nassar’s analysis and opinion pieces have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, +972 Magazine, The Conversation, and The Hill. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, son, and daughter, and she is working on her next book, a global history of Palestine’s people. Follow Dr. Nassar on Twitter here: @mtnassar

Watch or listen to Dr. Nassar’s FMEP programs, including: 

Jehad Abusalim is the Education and Policy Coordinator of the Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee. He is completing his PhD in the History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies joint program at New York University. His research focuses on Arab and Palestinian intellectual discourse on Zionism, antisemitism, and the plight of the Jewish people in Europe between 1870 and 1948. Jehad also studies the social and political history of the Gaza Strip, focusing on the continuing impact of the Nakba on life in Gaza before and after 1948. Mr. Abusalim has been published in the Washington Post, al-Jazeera, the New Arab, and Vox. Follow Mr. Abusalim on Twitter here: @JehadAbusalim

Watch or listen to Mr. Abusalim’s FMEP programs, including: 

 

FMEP Sponsored External Fellows

Rami Kablawi is an FMEP-sponsored graduate research fellow for the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute for the 2022-23 academic year. Rami is a recent master’s graduate of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Chicago, where he studied the history of US Counterterrorism laws and their application against Palestinian and Palestinian-American actors. He currently serves as a Legal Research Assistant for the law firm Palestine Legal, where he is working to assemble a report on lawfare against US-based Palestine advocacy. He hopes to continue to work in support of Palestinians, both in a professional capacity and as a community organizer.

Tariq Kenney-Shawa was an FMEP-sponsored fellow at the Middle East Institute’s Palestine Program (2021-2022). Tariq now serves as the U.S. Policy Fellow at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. Tariq completed his Masters in International Affairs at Columbia University, where he studied conflict resolution, international security, and journalism. During his time as a graduate student he also consulted for The New York Times, researching far-right extremism and threats posed to journalists. Before that, Tariq worked at a security consulting firm based in New York City, where he covered conflict developments across the Middle East and North Africa. As a Palestinian-American, Tariq hopes to pursue a career that contributes to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and equal rights and influences US foreign policy. In his free time, he is an avid street and travel photographer.

Nooran Alhamdan was an FMEP-sponsored fellow at the Middle East Institute (2020-2021), where she is graduate research fellow in the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs. An MA candidate in Arab Studies at the Edmond A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Nooran received her bachelor’s degree in analytical economics and political science, with a minor in Middle Eastern studies, from the University of New Hampshire. She is a former intern of the United Nations Population Fund and the Arab American Institute. She is also a recipient of an undergraduate international research grant and spent the summer of 2019 conducting a research project on Palestinian refugees in Jordan. In 2019 she was named a Harry S. Truman scholar, representing the state of New Hampshire.