Hilary Falb Kalisman
Director of Graduate Studies for the Program in Jewish Studies
Jewish Studies • History

听Office: MUEN D140G

Office Hours:听Wednesdays 1-3pm, in person听and via zoom at 听

Access Hilary Kalisman's CV Here


Assistant Professor of History and Endowed Professor of Israel/Palestine Studies in the Program in Jewish Studies


91制片厂 Prof. Kalisman:

Hilary Falb Kalisman holds a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley. Her research interests include education, colonialism, standardization, state and nation building in Israel/Palestine as well as in the broader Middle East. Her first book, Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East won the History of Education Society Outstanding Book award in 2023. This book uses a collective biography of thousands of public school teachers across Israel/Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan/Jordan to trace how the arc of teachers鈥 professionalization correlated with their political activity, while rearranging correspondence between nations, nationalism, and governments across the region.

Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Academy of Education, the American Academic Institute in Iraq as well as the International Institute of Education, among other organizations. She has recently begun a new project analyzing the history of standardized testing in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. During the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Initiative, part of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.

Her teaching comprises Jewish and Middle Eastern History, with specializations in the history of Israel/Palestine, the history of education, transnational history as well as the history of childhood.

Areas of Research Related to Jewish Studies:

History of Israel/Palestine, standardized testing in Israel and the Middle East, education and childhood in Mandate Palestine, religion and education in Israel.

Courses Taught:

  • Transnational History听
  • Jewish History Since听1492 (JWST/HIST 1828)
  • History of Modern Israel/Palestine (JWST/HIST 4338)
  • Jews in and of the Middle East (JWST/HIST 4348)
  • History Today: Global Intensive听in Israel/Palestine (JWST/HIST听4388-801)听

Recent and Forthcoming Publications (Selected):

鈥淎postles of knowledge: Feminine modernities and the travelling schoolmistresses of interwar Iraq.鈥澨Gender & History,听1鈥16, 2024.听

Teachers as State-builders: Educators and the Making of the Modern Middle East Princeton University Press, September, 2022.

鈥溾淎 World of Tomorrow鈥: Diaspora Intellectuals and Liberal Thought in the 1950s,鈥 Journal of Palestine Studies, 50:2, 2021.

"The historiography of education in the modern Middle East"听History of Education, 52(2鈥3), 311鈥329.听

The next generation of cultivators鈥: teaching agriculture in Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan听(1920-1960)".听Histoire De L'茅ducation.听no. 148, 2019. 听

"Education Policy in Iraq: Competing Visions of the State." in Benjamin Iskahan, Shamiran Mako and Fadi Dawood (eds.),听State and Society in Iraq: Citizenship under Occupation, Dictatorship and Democratization, London, I.B. Tauris, 2017.听

"The Little Persian Agent in Palestine: Husayn Ruhi, British Intelligence, and World War I,"听The Jerusalem Quarterly, Issue 66, September 2016