Summary
Author of Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile (University of California Press, 2020), an ethnographic history of Palestinian Chicago’s shift from secular nationalism toward Islam and the hybrid identities that interaction produced (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.5-7).
Details
- Lybarger first encountered Palestinian communities as a volunteer English teacher in the West Bank (1986-89), during the First Intifada; after the military closure of all schools in early 1988 he worked with the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center in East Jerusalem collecting data on Israeli military violence (PDF p.26).
- He taught English in the Gaza Strip in 1991-93, then did a full year of dissertation fieldwork in Palestine in 1999-2000, the foundation for his first book on the transformation of Palestinian identity in response to the Islamist-secular-nationalist fracture (PDF p.26-27).
- In Chicago he volunteered briefly at the Arab Community Center (Chicago) and attended its organizing meetings through the mid-1990s and early 2000s, and attended the 1998 Arab American Action Network fundraising dinner at which students interrupted Edward Said’s keynote with the maghrib prayer (PDF p.27-28).
- The Chicago fieldwork for this book comprised summer research trips in 2010-2013, a two-year residency in 2013-15, site observations and more than eighty recorded life-story interviews (PDF p.28).
- He is at Ohio University; his colleagues there and two NEH awards supported the work (PDF p.18-20).