Ferial B. Khalifa

Research Project:
Political Agency and Emancipation in the Palestinian Post-Oslo Accords Cinema

Ferial Khalifa completed her PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester and her MA in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Her PhD research explored Islamic Women’s Piety Movement in the Palestinian West Bank. Instead of framing this movement as an outcome of Islamist politics and a subordination to patriarchal norms, Khalifa framed this movement as a social field, a new social movement, and an important gender empowerment means.

Ferial's research interests include religion, nationalism and gender in Arab cinema; Palestinian cinema and literature; biography and history; and critical and feminist theories.   

She is currently an independent scholar and researcher. In 2017-2018, Ferial was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Divinity School. Prior to that, she taught sociology at several universities in the Palestinian West Bank and was a research consultant at several government and non-government organizations in the same place.

Her research at Columbia Global Centers | Amman will examine the extent to which Palestinian Post-Oslo Accords cinema mirrors an oppressive colonial reality but also disrupts that reality by creating a liberated space through which Palestinians maintain hope and “exist in the future”. She plans to explore this theme in Post-Oslo Accords women’s and human rights’ cinemas. Furthermore, through exploring post-Arab Spring cinema, Dr Khalifa also plans to examine the role cinema plays in societies that suffer from political conflict, war and displacement. 

Publications

Khalifa, Ferial. "Pious-modern subjectivities in the Palestinian West Bank: Identity formations and contours between the individual and the familial, the local and the global." Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global Society. Routledge, 2020. 105-116. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315646435-8a/pious-modern-subjectivities-palestinian-west-bank-ferial-khalifa.

Khalifa, Ferial. "Palestinian Short-Story Writer Samira 'Azzam (1927-1967. " The Literary Encyclopedia. January 2017.

“Geography, ”  Short-Story.  al-Adab, in Arabic, April 2021.  Available at< http://al-adab.com/article/%D8%AC%D8%BA%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%81%D9%8A%D8%A7?>

“On the Palestinian painter Ibrahim Ghannam (1931-1984). ”    Tibaq, in Arabic, July 2020.  Translated from  Kamal Bulata’s “Artists Re-Member Palestine in Beirut",  Publishing, Online, Available at: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/277752969411666/posts/919566961896927>.

“If it were for me”, Poetry.  Tibaq, in Arabic, December 2020. Available at: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/277752969411666/posts/1045321622654793>.