Salim Tamari was born in Jaffa in 1945 but had to flee the city with his family in 1948. He is the director of the Institute for Jerusalem Studies, editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly and associate professor of sociology at Birzeit University. Tamari co-directs Birzeit’s Mediterranean Studies Unit. He was a visiting fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT and is currently the Visiting Arcapita Professor at Columbia University. His research draws heavily on archival materials and personal diaries to examine the social and political forces that shaped and re-shaped Palestine in the 20th century. He is author of “Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and Their Fate in the War,” “Palestinian Refugee Negotiations: From Madrid to Oslo II,” and most recently, “Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture,” published in 2008 by the University of California Press. Dr. Tamari served on the refugee committee in the multilateral peace talks that began in the wake of the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference.