Samar Saeed (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Georgetown University. She researches the history of Palestine, especially, the role of women in the Palestinian Revolution between the 1960-1970s. She uses oral history to retrieve women’s experiences, stories, and contributions to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. When she is not researching Palestine, Samar loves to run the streets of DC and Amman, her two alternating hometowns.
Research Project: Gender and Revolution: A Social History of Jordan in the 1960s-1970s
My research focuses on the different roles women assumed during the period of the Palestinian Revolution in Jordan between the 1960s-1970s.Women were central to the organizing, mobilizing, and teaching that took place in support of the Palestinian Resistance. I argue that without the myriad roles women played, the revolution would not have been able to sustain itself in the way it did, first in Jordan and later in Lebanon. My main method of inquiry is oral history and focuses on the inclusion of women into the historical narratives of the Palestinian revolution. Oral history is an important method that many gender and labor historians are incorporating in their work to capture the voices of marginalized groups who tend to be absent from official historical documents and, as a result, their stories cannot be located in the archive. Also, oral history helps us examine women’s mundane experiences: women (fighters and non-fighters) carried the revolution through their everyday practices of speaking, educating, caring, and fighting. Hence, using oral histories, autobiographies, and archives, when available, allows us to place women in their rightful historical place.