Liora Halperin Guest Lecture

The Center for the Study of the Middle East

announces a lecture by

 Liora Halperin, Visiting Fellow at Harvard University

Babel in Zion: Hebrew and the Politics of Language Diversity in Mandate Palestine 

will be presented on 

Monday February 21, at 1:00 p.m. in the Maurer School of Law, Room 335.

Liora Halperin is completing her Ph.D. in History at UCLA (Jewish history and Middle Eastern history fields) and holds her undergraduate degree in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard. Since 2009 she has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies and a Teaching Fellow in the Harvard History Department. Her research focuses on the politics of language within the Jewish community of interwar Palestine (known as the Yishuv) and considers how a society broadly committed to the Zionist ideal of Hebrew language exclusivity represented and negotiated linguistic difference in a society constituted of multilingual immigrants, under British rule, in heart of the Arabic-speaking Middle East.

Her broader research and teaching interests include the history of Israel and Palestine; language and nationalism in comparative perspective; sociolinguistics; cultural history; and the history of the everyday.  Her article "Orienting Language: Reflections on the Study of Arabic in the Yishuv" appeared in the Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2006) and her article on Zionist attitudes toward foreign languages was recently published in Reflections on Knowledge and Language in Middle Eastern Societies (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011). Her work has been supported by the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, and the Foundation for Jewish Culture Doctoral Dissertation Grant.