Hana Sleiman is a Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Edinburgh. She researches the history of historiography in the Levant, with a focus on archive building and record keeping in the twentieth century. She earned a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge (2021) and an MA in Middle East Studies from Columbia University (2013). Before joining the University of Edinburgh, she was an Early Career Research Fellow in History at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge (2020-2022). Previously, she was the Special Collections Librarian at the American University of Beirut Archives (2014 – 2016), part of the team working on the Constantine Zurayk personal papers and co-leading the Palestinian Oral History Archive.
Research project:
I am currently working on my book titled “The Hands That History Make: Beirut’s Historiographical Ecosystem (1920-1980)”. It charts a history of the city’s modern historiographic ecosystem, documenting the ideas, people, professions and spaces that have made the writing (and omission) of history possible. The project traces the transformation of paper into historical sources across three spaces and at the hands of three archetypes: 1) the home / the family record keeper, 2) the archive / the archivist, and 3) the university / the historian. The book tells a story of the co-constitutive and gendered ways in which these roles developed, and their underlying technical, intellectual, and material infrastructure. It explores how these spaces and processes have defined not only history writing but the very meaning of history in the twentieth-century Levant.