PROF. Kimberly Katz
Kimberly Katz joined Towson University’s History Department in 2003 after earning her PhD in History and Middle East Studies from New York University in 2001. Her research and teaching interests focus on the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, spanning social, cultural, colonial, and post-colonial historical perspectives, with a particular interest in biographical and urban history. She has conducted research in Jordan, Palestine, Tunisia, and Egypt with the support of various fellowships, including Fulbright, Palestinian Research Center (PARC), American Institute for Maghrib (AIMS), and Towson University's Faculty Development and Research Center and the College of Liberal Arts Dean's Office.
Her first book, Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces, was published in 2005 by the University Press of Florida. Her second book, A Young Palestinian’s Diary, 1941-1945: The Life of Sami ‘Amr, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2009. In 2017, that book was published in Arabic by the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing in Amman, Jordan. She has also published widely in academic journals, including Urban History, Biography, the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), and the Journal of North African Studies (JNAS).
MY LATEST RESEARCH
Professor Katz's current research interests focus on legal history. She spent the 2018-2019 academic year on a Fulbright Fellowship in Jordan conducting archival research. During the summers of 2019 and 2023, she took up Center for American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) Fellowships at the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan. Professor Katz shared some of her published work with a variety of institutions in Amman: the University of Jordan's Department of History, Petra University, the Qasid Institute, the Hebron Forum, and King's Academy. She was also invited to deliver a lecture to the Department of History at Mohammad V University in Rabat, Morocco. Professor Katz will present the early results of her current research at the Nordic Middle East Studies Conference in Helsinki, Finland and at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference in New Orleans, LA in 2019.
CRIME HISTORY OF HEBRON IN THE 1950s
This project examines Jordan’s West Bank transitional period in the early 1950s, detailing how both law and law enforcement developed as part of the social history of the enforcement of Jordan’s post-colonial legal code, focusing in particular on the Hebron district.
Studies have demonstrated the continuity in policing and law in Palestine from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate to the State of Israel, but that subject has received little attention on the transition from British Mandate to Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Scholarship focusing on British Mandate Palestine law enforcement examines inter alia the British, Arab, and Jewish personnel who staffed the Palestine Police, the classification and analysis of crimes committed, and the ways policing in Palestine affected developments in law and order among the population. Very little scholarship has addressed the role of policing and law in the Jordanian West Bank, the part of Palestine that came and remained under the control of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1948 until Israel’s capture of the territory during the June 1967 war.
URBAN IDENTITY IN COLONIAL TUNISIA
My work explores, in a microhistory, the writings of Salih Suwaysi al-Qayrawani, an early 20th century Tunisian intellectual. His maqāmāt, written while Tunisia was under French colonial rule, both addresses the nature of France’s occupation of Tunisia while also demonstrating the author’s interest in urban space. Suwaysi’s maqāmāt “explore tensions between modernity and tradition by articulating both the resonances and discontinuities among urban, religious, protonational, and anticolonial identities under the French Protectorate in Tunisia (1881-1956).”