Spending time in Bethlehem over many years, I became acutely aware of the town’s remarkable connectedness to the wider world. Everyone has a cousin, an auntie, a brother, living on the other side of the world, mostly in Latin America.
Jacob Norris
Jacob Norris is Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Sussex in the UK where he also co-directs the Middle East and North Africa Centre (MENACS). His work looks at the history of Palestine in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods, within global and transnational frameworks. His first book, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Since then, his research has focused primarily on the history of Bethlehem, tracking the circulation of merchants from the town around the world during the late Ottoman period. His latest book, published with Stanford University Press, is The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub (Or How the Bethlehemites Discovered Amerka) which uses fictional devices to narrate the travels of Bethlehem merchants in the late nineteenth century. He is also co-director of the Planet Bethlehem Archive project which is collecting, sharing, and curating digital materials from around the Bethlehem diaspora.
