Professor May Seikaly – Wayne State University, Detroit, MI

Project Title: Palestinian Oral History

Professor May Seikaly has researched, and collected data on, memory and experience of Palestinians for the past fifteen years. From 1996 until the present, Seikaly researched extensively the Muslim and Christian Palestinian communities in the old city of Jerusalem. Furthermore, on a Fulbright grant in 2000/2001 she was able to research peasant communities in the Galilee and in the environs of Jerusalem.

The lion’s share of her work has consisted of the compilation of interviews and informal discussions conducted with several hundred Palestinians. Her latest project focused on ten villages in the Galilee and five in the Jerusalem area that the Israelis destroyed in 1948.

Notes Seikaly, “[f]rom this latest project I collected almost eighty personal interviews as the hardcore documentation of the personal experiences of survivors of the catastrophe and their displacement and at least forty interviews from the old city of Jerusalem.”

Her project is to “organize, index, and permanently archive” all of the material that she has collected over the past six years. The material is to be preserved on compact discs. Furthermore, all the material is to be transcribed and translated into English. It is hoped that this archive will contribute to the preservation of Palestinian history.