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Professor Dina Matar joined SOAS in 2005. Prior to SOAS, she worked as research teaching fellow at the LSE Media and Communications department and lectured in diplomatic and  international journalism at City University Before her academic career, Dina practiced journalism working in London, Bahrain, Beirut, Cairo, Hong Kong and Palo Alto.

She has served as chair of the SOAS Centre for Global Media and Communications since 2014, and also served as head of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies between 2020 and 2022 before moving to the School of Law, Gender and Media. Dina received her PhD and MSc. in Media and Communications and Comparative Politics from the LSE and has a BSc. in Chemistry from Jordan University in Amman.

Professor Matar is the author of What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood (I.B. Tauris, 2011); and co-author of the Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication (Hurst, 2012). She is co-editor of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2013); Gaza as Metaphor (Hurst, 2016); Producing Palestine (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024); co-editor of The Handbook of Media and War (Routledge forthcoming) and co-editor of Archiving Gaza in the Present (Saqi, 2025). She is sole editor of Reframing Political Communication in the Middle East and North Africa; Towards de-colonization (Bloomsbury, 2025). Matar is also co-editor of the SOAS Palestine Book Series.

Dina has published extensively in the areas of critical political communication, journalism, memory studies, representation and identity, media and gender, media and epistemic violence and media and war. She is the recipient of several grants from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. She is a member of the editorial board of Communication, Culture and Critique and was founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She served as editor with the Journal of  Media, War and Conflict.

Affiliations

• Senate: Member
• Royal Society of Art: Fellow

• Matar, Dina (2010) What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood. London: I B Tauris. · Matar, Dina and Khatib, Lina and Alshaer, Atef (2014) The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication. London; New York, NY: Hurst and Oxford University Press.
• Matar, D., ed. (forthcoming, 2025) Reframing Political Communication in the Middle East and North Africa. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Matar, D. and Porter, V. (forthcoming, 2025). Archiving Gaza in the Present. London: Saqi Books.
• Tawil-Souri, H, and Matar, D. (eds.) (2016). Gaza as Metaphor. London: Hurst
• Tawil-Souri, H. and Matar, D. (eds.) (2024). Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine through contemporary media, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Matar, D. and Harb, Z. (2013). Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communication Practices in Lebanon and Palestine. London: I. B. Tauris.
• Matar, D. (2025). Habitual Media: interrogating Western legacy media's complicity in the epistemic 'war' against Palestinians. Third World Quarterly, available online
• Matar, D. (2024) "What it means to be Palestinian: Reflections on anti-colonial identities in times of excessive production and destruction". Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 17 (3): 246-253.
• Matar, D. (forthcoming). Im(possibilities) of Palestinian ‘audiences’ in times of permanent war in T. Sabry et. al, de-colonising Audience Studies, London: Routledge.
• Matar, D. (forthcoming, 2025). Palestinian storytelling, witnessing and remembering as politics in the margin in D. Matar (ed.) Reframing Political Communication in the Middle East and North Africa. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Matar, D. (2024). Recentering Palestine and Palestinians in poster art. In Helga-Tawil Souri and D. Matar (eds.) Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine in contemporary media. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Matar, D. and Sherouk Maher (2023) Comparative analysis of Israeli and PLO diplomacy practices during the May 2021 Israeli attacks against Gaza. In: Miladi, N. (ed.) ‘Global Media Coverage of the PalestinianIsraeli Conflict: Reporting the Sheikh Jarrah Evictions’, London: I.B. Tauris Bloomsbury. August 2023.
• Matar, D. and Khouloud Helmi (2020). ‘Liminality: Gendering and Syrian Alternative Media Spaces’ in Sarah Maltby et.al. (eds.) War of Spaces of War, Spaces of War, Bloomsbury Academic: London.
• Matar, D. (2017). First framing and news: Lessons from reporting Jordan in crises. In Harb. Z. (ed.) Reporting the Middle East: The Practices of News in the twenty-first Century. London: I.B. Tauris, pp 33-49.
• Matar, Dina (2016) 'Narratives and the Syrian Uprising: The Role of Stories in Political Activism and Identity Struggles.' In: Zayani, Mohamed and Merghani, Suzi, (eds.), Bullets and Bulletins: Media

De-colonial political communication; critical media and cultural studies, memory studies, identities and diasporas, media and war and Palestine studies.