Profile for Heidi Morrison

Brief biography

            Dr. Morrison’s interest in the Middle East began over twenty years ago as a Malcolm Kerr Scholar with the National Council on US-Arab Relations.  As a high school student in the summer of 1993, Morrison participated in a three-week study tour of Egypt in honor of the life and works of Malcolm Kerr, former Middle East scholar and president of the American University in Beirut who had an untimely death due to political violence.  Morrison received a BA in French literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. With an interest in colonial North Africa, she decided on graduate work in Middle East Studies with a less “colonial” approach to the region than graduate work in Francophone Studies. She completed a MA in Middle East Studies at Harvard University, and a PhD in Modern Middle East History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Morrison is a social and cultural historian seeking to understand the modern Middle East through the lens of some of its most understudied historical shapers and movers; i.e.  children and youth.  Her monograph, Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt (Palgrave 2015), is the first of its kind to underscore childhood and children in modern Middle East history.  She is also the compiler and editor of The Global History of Childhood Reader (Routledge 2012) and co-general editor of A Cultural History of Youth six-volume set (Bloomsbury, 2020 expected).  She is currently working on a book entitled Surviving Memory in Palestine: Narrative, Trauma, and Children of the Second Intifada . Her research has been sponsored by public and private funding agencies such as The Fulbright Scholarships (Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, CIES), The Palestinian-American Research Center (PARC), The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Grant Program (U.S, Department of Education), and the Center for Arabic Studies Aboard (CASA, US, Department of Education).

            Morrison’s articles and reviews have appeared in leading national and international journals, such as the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (Johns Hopkins), International Journal of Middle East Studies (Cambridge), Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, and Muslim World Journal of Human Rights (Berkeley). She has chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education (Oxford, 2019) and Childhood in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Territories (Brill, 2015).  Her engaged scholarship includes regular blogs on the contemporary Middle East at Le Monde Diplomatique (English version), as well as blogs at Counterpunch, Ms. Magazine, and Mondoweiss. Morrison is founding president of the Association for Middle East Children and Youth Studies (AMECYS) and board member of the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC).