Rosemary Sayigh (née: Boxer; born 1927) is a British-born journalist and scholar of Middle Eastern history. She is known for her works on the Palestinian people, particularly those forcibly displaced to Lebanon as a result of the Nakba.
She began her MA in sociology and anthropology from the American University of Beirut in 1970.[5] Sayigh's masters' thesis was about the experience of Palestinians displaced to Lebanon, based on research and interviews undertaken at refugee camps in or near Beirut.[2][5] The thesis was accepted in 1976 despite resistance from her thesis advisor, thanks to intervention from a Palestinian history professor at the University.[2]
After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1948, Sayigh moved to Italy, first working as an au pair and then as an assistant at a British Institute Library. On her return to London a year later, she struggled to find employment, eventually getting a position at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.[2]
In 1952, Sayigh's friend Desmond Stewart found her a teaching job at Queen Aliya College in Baghdad, Iraq.[5][2] Stewart was a classical scholar teaching in Baghdad at the College of Arts and Sciences at the same time. Sayigh taught at Queen Aliya College for two years, overlapping on the faculty with Palestinian novelist and painter Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.[2] It was while teaching in Iraq that Sayigh first learned of the events of the Nakba, from her Iraqi nationalist friends. After her contract at Queen Aliya College ended, having developed a relationship with her future husband Yusif, Sayigh moved to Beirut, Lebanon to marry and live with him.[2]
In Beirut, Sayigh began working as a journalist. Through visits with her mother-in-law's cousin, Sayigh began interviewing the residents of Dbayeh camp and sharing the interviews in articles for Kayhan Weekly, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and later The Economist.[2] Sayigh stopped writing for The Economist in 1970, when she left due to disapproval of the magazine's "uncritical, pro-American position on the Vietnam War."[5] In 1979, her first book Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries; A People's History was published by Zed Press.[6] The original cover photo was taken by Don McCullin.[2] The first edition of the book included an introduction by Noam Chomsky, who also wrote the foreword to the 2007 edition.[7]
In 1967, Sayigh was a founding member of The Fifth of June Society, an NGO established in Beirut to combat anti-Arab content in Westernmedia.[2] The society was named to commemorate the date on which the Six-Day War began. The society shared information about Palestine and the Palestinian resistance movement. Interested journalists were welcomed, taken on tours of refugee camps in Beirut and given information packs about Palestine.[5] The society also aimed to connect with pro-Palestinian groups across the world.[5]
Between 1983 and 1993, Sayigh worked with Palestinian women in camps in Lebanon, including Shatila refugee camp, on an oral history project.[8] In 1993, her second book, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon was published, also by Zed Books.[9] In 1999, she won an award from the Diana Tamari Sabbagh Foundation to travel through Palestine and record women's accounts of displacement. This work forms the basis of "Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement: A Web-based Oral Archive", recorded in Arabic. Sayigh presented a lecture version of the archive to the 15th International Oral History Association Conference in Prague, Czech Republic in July 2010.[2]
She has been an unofficial supervisor to several PhD candidates researching Palestinian social and political history. Her areas of interest include gender and politics; the political responsibility of the researcher; memory and identity; and culture and resistance.[10] In 2000, she became a visiting lecturer in oral history and anthropology at the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) at the American University of Beirut.[4][11]
