Professor Karma Nabulsi

Her research is on 18th and 19th century political thought, the laws of war, and the contemporary history and politics of Palestinian refugees and representation. Her work is published in a variety of arenas: OUP, Verso, CUP, Annales, Etudes Philosophiques, the Journal of Political Ideologies, Government and Opposition, the European Journal of Political Theory, the Guardian, the LRB, and the TLS. She is currently contributing to the new Oxford Handbook of Rousseau, with a chapter on ‘Emancipation’.

Karma directed a civic needs assessment for Palestinian refugees, and was editor of its findings: Palestinians Register: Laying Foundations and Setting Directions (2006). She went on to design and direct the civic voter registration for Palestinian refugees to their national parliament, from 2011-2016, working with the UN, the UNHCR, and UNRWA, as well as with national and international central elections commissions. The endeavour also created a robust and secure online voting mechanism, designed with colleagues at Oxford, and used by the international institutions serving the needs of refugees.

She recently completed a digital humanities programme that was sponsored by the British Academy and is hosted at the DPIR. It was developed with scholars, museums, research institutes, and universities across the global south, providing a bilingual open-access research and teaching resource. The online course and research materials cover the Palestinian liberation movement, during the anti-colonial era of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Karma read for her masters and doctorate at Balliol College, and was an Open Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College from 1998 to 2005 (2000-2001 as Jean Monnet Fellow in History at the European University Institute) before coming to Teddy Hall as Politics tutor. She has been a visiting professor at institutions in Europe, the Middle East, and North America.

Amongst recent awards was the Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) ‘Special Recognition Award’ in 2016; the Guardian Higher Education Network ‘Inspiring Leader’ Award in 2017; the ‘Arab Woman of the Year’ Award in 2018. She is UCU Equalities Officer at the University, and a Senior Harassment Advisor at the Hall.