lic. phil. Sarah El Bulbeisi
- University of Zurich, Master of Arts
- PhD student, lecturer and research assistant at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich
- E-Mail: Sarah.Bulbeisi@lmu.de
- Website: http://www.naher-osten.uni-muenchen.de/personen/wiss_ma/sarah_bulbeisi/index.html
Short CV
I studied Near and Middle Eastern Studies (Arabic and Persian), History and Political Science at the University of Zurich and Amman. Since 2011, I am working as a lecturer and research assistant in the Arabic department at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-University of Munich, teaching Arabic and Islamic Studies. My research interests include postcolonial studies, trauma studies, Palestine studies and psychoanalysis. Currently, I’m writing my PhD thesis provisionally entitled “On the Relation between Trauma and Identity: Subject Constructions of Palestinians in the Western European Diaspora”.
Statement on research
I am interested in the lifeworld of Palestinians of the first and the second generation in Germany and Switzerland. "First and second generation" is here not understood in a temporal, but in a systematic sense: the first generation that migrated to Western Europe, as well as the second one who grew up in the Western Diaspora.
Based on biographical-narrative interviews and participant observation, the thesis inquires the tension between the (family) history of the interviewees, which is characterized by the experience of expulsion and dispossession, and the reshaping of this experience in the Western European representation of the so called "Middle East conflict" which merely reproduced for a long time the Zionist narrative.
While remembering the holocaust and the National Socialist past has formed an constitutive element in European collective memory, the Palestinian culture of remembrance has been excluded and until now even suppressed. The family histories of the interviewees have remain largely ignored. The project examines how the interviewees in this context interpret their lives and see or speak about themselves. I am interested in how the interviewees imbed themselves in the texture of these different narratives: the life stories of the parents, Palestinian cultural memory, orientalist discourses in the West and the "story of the Others" as part of the western master narrative.