Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture: Noura Erakat

Noura Erakat is professor of Africana studies and criminal justice at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award sponsored by the Middle East Monitor, and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is a legal scholar with research interests in humanitarian law, human rights law, critical race theory, national security law, and Palestinian studies. She has published over two dozen academic articles and book chapters, including in the American Journal of International Law, American Quarterly, and the Oxford Bibliographies in International Law. In 2023, Noura co-chaired an Independent Task Force on the Application of National Security Memorandum-20 to Israel, a report documenting how U.S. arms to Israel have been used in violation of U.S. and international law and which was submitted to the White House. She is co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies as well as of Human Geography. She is a co-founding board member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, as Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as national organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura has also produced video documentaries, including “Gaza In Context” and “Black Palestinian Solidarity.” Her writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Al Jazeera, and the Boston Review. She is a frequent commentator on CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, the BBC, and NPR, among others. Noura recently completed non-resident fellowship of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School and a Mahmoud Darwish Visiting Professorship at Brown University. In 2022, she was selected as a Freedom Fellow by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. In 2025, the University of Ghent named her as the Amnesty International Chair.