Palestinian scholar to deliver lecture

Public Lectures

Palestinian-British author and academic Dr Ghada Karmi will deliver the annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide on Saturday 6 October.

Dr Karmi is an honorary research fellow and assistant lecturer at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

A well-known international commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Dr Karmi appears widely in the British and Arab media and frequently has articles on the Middle East published in The Guardian (UK), The Nation (US) and Journal of Palestine Studies.

Although born in Jerusalem, Dr Karmi has spent most of her life in Britain, where she studied medicine and initially practised as a physician, specialising in the health and social conditions of ethnic minorities, migrants and asylum seekers.

In her 2002 autobiography, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, she describes growing up in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Katamon, with its mixture of Christian and Muslim Palestinians. With her family she was forced to flee in 1948 and settled in London, where her father worked for the BBC Arabic service.

The Edward Said Memorial Lecture honours the memory of one of the most famous Palestinian intellectuals in the world until his death in 2003.

Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk delivered the inaugural Edward Said lecture in 2005 and Israeli scholar the late Professor Tanya Reinhart followed up in 2006. Both lectures were sold out.

A year before his death, Edward Said described Dr Karmi's autobiography as "a stunning memoir... extraordinarily well written and amazingly honest".

"Hers is a story of exile and displacement... rich in detail and human experience. Karmi is excellent on the quality of family and even communal life in Mandatory Palestine... she also has a wonderfully subtle way of showing how in thousands of different ways the political and the personal intermesh, and this she does with a skill and insight that could be a novelist's envy," Said wrote.

This year's Edward Said Memorial Lecture on Saturday 6 October will be held in Elder Hall at 5pm.

Tickets $12 if pre-purchased online www.friendsofpalestine.org.au or from Digimob Australia at 246 Pulteney Street, Adelaide, and $15 at the door.

For more information, go to www.adelaide.edu/esml

Story by Candy Gibson