Sa’ed Atshan has been tapped as the keynote speaker for this year’s Notre Dame Student Peace Conference, “Peace by Piece: Disrupting Dualities in Peacebuilding.”
An associate professor of peace and conflict studies and anthropology at Swarthmore College, Atshan will present “Sexualities and Queer Imaginaries Across the Middle East and North Africa” on the afternoon of Friday, April 12—the first day of the two-day conference.
“We are so excited to welcome Dr. Atshan to our conference and to Notre Dame,” said conference chairs and organizers Lina Abdellatif, Garrett Pacholl and Mia Moran.
While Atshan’s presentation will be his first for the student peace conference, he is no stranger to the Kroc Institute. In 2021 he presented “Enduring Humanitarianism in the Palestinian Territories” as part of the Kroc Institute’s lecture series, and has been a guest lecturer in Professor Atalia Omer’s class, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict through Films.”
“Dr. Atshan applies a nuanced lens to the Palestinian conflict,” said Abdellatif. “He not only provides a Palestinian point of view, but he considers how the intersection of gender, of being queer in Palestine, and genocide contribute to the settler-colonial state.”
“His work fits perfectly for our conference theme,” echoed Moran.
Atshan earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies and an M.A. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He also holds a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a B.A. from Swarthmore College. He is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020), co-author (with Katharina Galor) of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020), and co-editor (with Galor) of Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2022).
The Notre Dame Student Peace Conference is an annual conference organized by undergraduate peace studies students at the University of Notre Dame. This year's conference takes place April 12-13, 2024. Registration is free but required.
Originally published by at kroc.nd.edu on February 19, 2024.