Visiting Professor
Abigail Jacobson is a historian of the Middle East, with a specialization in modern Palestine. Dr. Jacobson, a native Israeli, earned a PhD in Middle East History from the University of Chicago in 2006. Her dissertation studied communal relations in Jerusalem in the transitional years of the late Ottoman Empire and the early British Mandate (c. 1910-1920), when collective identities were in many ways fluid. Her first book, entitled From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2011. She is currently working on two main projects. The first focuses on the history of Palestinian communism and anti-imperial struggle at the end of the British mandate and the early years of the State of Israel. The second project discusses relations and links between Jews of Arab descent and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine.
After teaching at various institutions in Israel, where she also trained as a conflict mediator, Dr. Jacobson served as junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. She joined the Elie Wiesel Center in 2012 as a visiting research fellow in Israel studies. In the fall of 2013, she taught a course on the Israeli Palestinian conflict that was featured in BUToday. Jacobson is currently teaching in the Department of History at MIT. At BU she will be offering her course on The Israeli Palestinian Conflict again in the Spring 2015 term.