Edward Said Memorial Lecture | The Question of Palestine in America

Join us for the Edward Said Memorial Lecture, featuring Moustafa Bayoumi, a former student of Edward Said and a renowned writer, journalist, & professor. Bayoumi will explore “The Question of Palestine in America,” offering insights shaped by his time learning directly from Edward Said.

As the genocide in Gaza continues, the bombing of Lebanon proceeds, the dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank advances, and the American leadership prepares to shift from a Biden to a Trump Administration, assessing the present and future prospects for Palestine is of the utmost urgency. In this lecture, Moustafa Bayoumi will examine this state of affairs through the lens of how Palestine has historically operated, both as an idea and as a political struggle, in American culture, and why the Question of Palestine continues to matter in America.

Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning author, journalist, and professor. He is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction, and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), which was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. Bayoumi is also a columnist and feature writer for The Guardian and a regular contributor to The Nation. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The National, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Progressive, and other places. With Andrew Rubin, he co-edited The Selected Works of Edward Said: 1996-2006 (Vintage), and he is the editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict (O/R and Haymarket Books). He has been profiled in a wide array of national and international media and has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Award. Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.