Rashid Khalidi
رشيد الخالدي
Born: New York City, United States
Domain: Academia & Thought
Recognition: GLOBAL
Biography
Rashid Ismail Khalidi was born in New York City in 1948 to a father from a distinguished Palestinian family of Jerusalem and a Lebanese-American mother. He took his BA at Yale and his doctorate at Oxford, and taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, Georgetown, and the University of Chicago before holding the Edward Said Professorship of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University from 2003 until 2025. There he also directed the Middle East Institute and chaired the history department. Khalidi is among the foremost living historians of the modern Middle East and of Palestinian nationalism. His landmark study Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997) argued that a distinct Palestinian national identity began to coalesce well before 1948, drawing on the press, education, and politics of the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. The book reshaped scholarly understanding of when and how Palestinian peoplehood took form. His 2020 book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 became an international bestseller and a defining popular history of the conflict, framing it as a sustained colonial war against the Palestinian people. Earlier works such as Resurrecting Empire (2004) and Brokers of Deceit (2013) offered influential critiques of Western and American policy in the region. Beyond the academy, Khalidi served as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation during the Madrid and Washington peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993, and he edited the Journal of Palestine Studies and served as president of the Middle East Studies Association. He has been one of the most visible scholarly commentators on Palestine in American public life. Through decades of teaching at elite universities and a body of work that bridges rigorous archival history and accessible public writing, Khalidi has trained a generation of scholars and brought the Palestinian historical experience to a vast international readership, extending the intellectual legacy of his predecessors into the twenty-first century.
Why This Person Matters
Khalidi is a leading historian of Palestinian nationalism whose work, from Palestinian Identity to the bestselling Hundred Years' War on Palestine, has framed how a global readership understands the conflict.