The 46th George Antonius Memorial Lecture
As the culmination of a our academic year, the Middle East Centre (MEC) was delighted to welcome Professor Amaney A. Jamal to deliver the 46th Annual George Antonius Memorial Lecture on 13 June 2024.
Professor Jamal is Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics, and Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her scholarship covers the politics of the Middle East and North Africa, spanning mass and political behaviour, political development and democratisation, inequality and economic segregation, Muslim immigration, gender, race, religion and class. She is an acclaimed author, whose books include Of Empires and Citizens: Pro-American Democracy or No Democracy at All and Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World.
Outside of Princeton, Professor Jamal is also the co-Principal of the award-winning Arab Barometer project. This non-partisan research network measures public opinion through polling in the Middle East and North Africa. This has produced the largest and longest-standing repository of publicly available data on the views of ordinary men and women in the region. It is this important work, and specifically Professor Jamal’s examination of what people are thinking in Palestine itself, that was the focus of her lecture. Her lecture was entitled What Gazans Think Before and After October 7 and presented findings from the Arab Barometer’s surveys in Gaza and the West Bank.
As Professor Eugene Rogan, MEC Director, said in his introduction to the lecture ‘In this year of deafness, the importance of listening has been proven more important than anything. For that reason, knowing of her work, we felt that no one could better crown this year with meaningful content of value to our understanding of where we are since before the 7 October, at present and, from that, hopefully where we might be heading.’
If you were unable to join us here in Oxford, you can find the lecture recording published as part of our Middle East Centre Series on the University of Oxford Podcasts website, linked here.
