In this talk, Salim Tamari will discuss the Great War on the Eastern Front, looked at from the passage of one century, and how it led to the major transformations in the way in which the people of the region - from the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to the Arab provinces of the Empire - looked at themselves and at the world. He will also explore the ways in which the war was reflected in the biographical trajectories of soldiers who fought in it, civilians who endured it, and how the war led to the transformation of their lives, their societies, and reshaped their identity and affinities during and after the war. Salim's research on the transformation is based on the lives of several civilians and soldiers whose life trajectories marked the transition from Ottomanism to the new nationalist identities in the Middle East, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish and other, and whose narratives were published in the form of diaries and memoirs.
Salim Tamari is professor emeritus of sociology at Birzeit University, a senior research associate at the Institute for Palestine Studies and an editor of Jerusalem Quarterly. He has authored several works on urban culture, political sociology, biography and social history, and the social history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Recent publications include Mountain Against the Sea: A Conflicted Modernity (2008: UC Press); The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life of Times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh(2013: with Issam Nassar); Year of the Locust: A Soldier's Diary and Erasure of the Palestine's Ottoman Past (2011: UC Press); The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine (2017: UC Press); Landed Property and Public Endowments in Jerusalem(with Munir Fakhr Ed Din, 2018); Camera Palestina: Photography and the Sensual Impulse (UC Press; forthcoming 2019).
Salim received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Manchester University and has served as a visiting professor at Ca Foscari University; Georgetown University; New York University; Cornell University; University of Chicago; Harvard University; and at Columbia University. He was also a visiting researcher at MIT; University of California, Berkley; Boğaziçi University; and at Jussieu (Paris).
