A new portrait of Professor Karma Nabulsi (Balliol 1989) by Nina Mae Fowler has been unveiled.
Professor Karma Nabulsi is the Jarvis Doctorow Fellow and Tutor in Politics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Her research is on 18th- and 19th-century political thought, the laws of war, and the contemporary history and politics of Palestinian refugees and representation.
Her work is published in a variety of arenas: OUP, Verso, CUP, Annales, Etudes Philosophiques, the Journal of Political Ideologies, Government and Opposition, the European Journal of Political Theory, the Guardian, the LRB, and the TLS. She is currently contributing to the new Oxford Handbook of Rousseau, with a chapter on ‘Emancipation’.
She directed a civic needs assessment for Palestinian refugees, and was editor of its findings: Palestinians Register: Laying Foundations and Setting Directions (2006). She went on to design and direct the civic voter registration for Palestinian refugees to their national parliament, from 2011 to 2016, working with the UN, the UNHCR, and UNRWA, as well as with national and international central elections commissions. The endeavour also created a robust and secure online voting mechanism, used by international institutions serving the needs of refugees.
Her digital humanities programme covering the Palestinian liberation movement during the anti-colonial era of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s provides a bilingual open-access research and teaching resource. It won the Middle East Studies Association of North America’s Undergraduate Education Award.
The portrait was unveiled at a gathering of some of Karma Nabulsi’s friends, colleagues, and present and former students on 9 May. The chair of Balliol’s Arts and Chattels Committee, Revd Canon Bruce Kinsey, spoke of the College’s good fortune in being able to commission this artist, thanks to a generous donation; and he praised the artist for the way she had captured Karma Nabulsi’s ‘grace, power and warmth’. The portrait will be hung in the Master’s Dining Room.
Portrait of Karma Nabulsi, oil on canvas, 125 x 94 cm, 2022:
Karma Nabulsi with Nina Mae Fowler:
Karma Nabulsi with two of her students: