Lucy El-Sherif, an assistant professor in the Global Peace & Social Justice and the Gender & Social Justice programs, has received the 2024 Edward W. Said Research Study Award at Columbia University in New York City.

The fellowship, which supports promising scholars early in their careers, includes a one-month to one-term residency at Columbia’s Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities. While there, El-Sherif will have the opportunity to consult the Edward W. Said Papers in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, as well as connect with the university’s Center for Palestine Studies.

“My research focuses on race and Indigeneity by examining how racialization colonizes and colonization racializes for Arabs and Muslims in North America. It unpacks what it means to belong to settler states as racialized people,” said El-Sherif in an earlier interview. “I do so through unpacking Palestinian cultural production, specifically dance, done by Arab youth in Canada. What does it mean to dance a relationship to Palestine from Haudenosaunee territory on Turtle Island? How are Arab and Muslim racial inequality –particularly for visibly Muslim women—shaped by settler colonial relations to space and place?”

Her time at the Heyman Center will focus on select Said manuscripts and correspondence to support the development of her book, Dabke on Turtle Island. The book, she explains, “engages with Palestinian and Arab youth subjectivity at the intersection between orientalism and settler colonialism as manifested and performed in Palestinian dabke, a dialect of the Shami folk-dance.”

Edward W. Said, a Palestinian-American literary critic and academic, was perhaps best known for his books Orientalism, published in 1978, and Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993, both of which made major contributions to the field of cultural and postcolonial studies.

Lucy El-Sherif will be giving a research talk called “Dabke on Turtle Island” on Wednesday, September 27 from 12:30 to 1:30 in LRW 1003 (Community Room).