Dr Mezna Qato has been awarded a Fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) which supports exceptional scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
Dr Qato, a Margaret Anstee Research Fellow at Newnham College, was given the award for her research into Education in Exile: Palestinians and Postwar Regeneration. A study of pedagogy under peril, it explores the educational infrastructure developed to accommodate the needs of students after the 1948 war and the dispossession of Palestinians into expanded Jordanian territory.
The project examines how contradictions between political potential and class mobility produced practices of postwar economic and social regeneration. It mobilises alternative archival methods to chart the rise of new Palestinian social worlds in exile.
Formed a century ago, the ACLS is the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. For 2023, the program will award more than $3.8 million in research support to 60 scholars selected through a multi-stage peer review from a pool of nearly 1,200 applicants.
“With higher education under sustained attack around the country, ACLS is proud to support this diverse cohort of emerging scholars as they work to increase understanding of our connected human histories, cultures, and experiences,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly.
Dr Mezna Qato is a historian of the modern Middle East and in particular of education, migration, development, and Palestinian refugee and exile communities. She is a Fellow at the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, a centre at Newnham College for the study of international relations and economic and social development, and is an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.