Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi is an internationally-known scholar and a distinguished professor and researcher who continuously supports community development and student engagement alongside her extensive academic work and publication and teaching schedule. She is the Director and Senior Scholar in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies at the historic College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. Before joining SFSU, she served as the first director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She is a Policy Advisor for Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian independent think tank, and serves on the International Advisory Board of World Congress of Middle East Studies where she chairs its International Committee.
Her scholarship, pedagogy and public activism focuses on Palestine, Arab and Muslim communities and their diasporas, race and resistance studies, transnational feminisms, and gender and sexuality studies. Dr. Abdulhadi has taught at eight transnational sites of higher education including Yale University (from which she received her MA, MPhil, and PhD); CUNY Hunter College; the American University in Cairo (AUC); and Bir Zeit University, Palestine. She is the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Sterling Fellowship, Phi Beta Kappa, Prize Teaching Fellowship; AUC Teaching Excellence Award; New Century Scholarship; and community service recognition awards by American Muslims for Palestine, and Arab Women’s Union. She was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine; the Afro-Middle East Center in Johannesburg, South Africa; the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme, Aix-Marseille University and by Museum of the Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean, in Marseille, Francs; and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France.
Abdulhadi a co-founder and Editorial Board member of the Islamophobia Studies Journal and co-author of Mobilizing Democracy: Changing US Policy in the Middle East. She co-edited Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, winner of the 2012 National Arab American non-fiction Book Award; MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies special issue on Gender, Nation and Belonging (2005); and American Quarterly Forum on Palestine and American Studies (2015). She is co-editing Islamophobia: Gender, Sexuality and Racism, a special issue of the Islamophobia Studies Journal, and the anthology, Living Archives: Third World, Indigenous and anti-Colonial Queer and Feminist International Solidarities. Her work has appeared in Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian and Spanish in academic journals (International Feminist Journal of Politics; Al-Shabaka; Jadaliyya, Gender and Society; Radical History Review; Peace Review; and Journal of Women’s History); anthologies (This Bridge We Call Home; New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life in America; Shifting Borders: American in the Middle East/North Africa; We Will Not Be Silenced; Righting Injustice: The Case for the Academic Boycott of Israel; and With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and Empire); and social media newspapers and magazines (Mondoweiss, The Guardian, Al-Fajr; Womanews; Palestine Focus; Voice of Palestinian Women; Falasteen Al-Thahwra; Al-Hadaf; and Al-Hurriyah.
Professor Abdulhadi is a scholar/activist committed to collective work and justice-centered scholarship and pedagogy. She co-founded several community organizations such as the U.S. Branch of the General Union of Palestine Students; Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America (UPWA), and the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC). She was the first Arab or Muslim to be elected to the Board of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NY CLU). She served on the Board of the Brecht Forum; co-Chaired the Third World Coalition of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and initiated and co-organized the 1985 national 26-city US tour on “Israel and South Africa: The Apartheid Connection?” that was monumental in defining a Palestinian perspective on boycotts and sanctions along the lines of the anti-Apartheid movement. This builds on her earlier activism as an initiator of the Howard Beach Anti-Racist Campaign; the 500 Years of Genocide/500 Years of Resistance in 1992. She continues this activism today with her involvement in building Palestinian support for Idle No More, Justice for Michael Brown, the Movement for Black Lives, and Standing Rock. She is currently a co-leader of “100 Years of Colonialism, 100 Years of Resistance,” the International Palestinian Campaign to commemorate the Balfour Declaration. She Academically she co-founded the California Scholars for Academic Freedom, the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), and Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine, and has co-organized the BDS campaigns within the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) and the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). She co-organized and led the first Indigenous and Women of Color Feminist Delegation to Palestine and has since led other delegations, such as the 2014 Academic and Labor Delegation and the 2016 US Prisoner, Labor and Academic Delegation. She has been subjected to a relentless new McCarthyist and bullying campaign launched by a pro-Israel network that seeks to silence and intimidate her and dismantle the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies and advocacy for justice in/for Palestine at San Francisco State University.