Professor Dina Matar

I am Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at the Centre for Global Media and Communication at SOAS. I have an  MSc in Comparative Politics (LSE) and a PhD in Media and Communications (LSE). My PhD is from the London School of Economics. I have conducted research in the Arab World, particularly Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Before joining academia, I worked as a foreign correspondent covering the Middle East and then an editor working on the Middle East, Europe and Africa. My primary research interest is in the intersection of communication and politics with a focus on the marginal and the oppressed as well as the relationship between structure and power in the Middle East. My work and teaching are interdisciplinary, drawing on culture and media studies, politics, visual cultures, Islamist politics, oral history, area studies, diasporas, memory cultures and gendering communication. I have written two monographs, edited two books and written book chapters and articles in peer reviewed journals. The material from my first book “What it Means to be Palestinian” has been used as the basis for an animation movie which has received several awards. I am currently working on the sequel to that book focusing on the years from the Oslo agreement to the present. I have supervised 15 PhD students to completion. I am the chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies and the SOAS Academic Assembly. I am founding editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. I am co-editor of the SOAS Palestine Studies book series and the new book series, Political Communication and Media Practices in the Middle East and North Africa.

Affiliations:

Academic Assembly: Chair

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, Dina (2022) 'The PLO’s political communication arena; struggle over media legitimacy and domination'. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
• Matar, Dina (2019) 'The Syrian Regime’s Strategic Communication: Practices and Ideology'. International Journal of Communication, (13), pp 2398-2416.
• Matar, Dina (2018) 'PLO Cultural Activism: Mediating Liberation aesthetics in revolutionary contexts'. Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East, (38) 2, pp 354-364.
• Matar, Dina (2015) 'Hassan Nasrallah: The cultivation of image and language in the making of a charismatic leader'. Culture, Communication & Critique, (8) 3, pp 433-447.
• Tawil-Souri, Helga and Matar, Dina, (eds.), (2016) Gaza as Metaphor. London: Hurst.
• Matar, Dina and Harb, Zahera, (eds.), (2013) Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine. London: I B Tauris.
• Matar, Dina and Helmi, Khouloud (2020) 'Liminality; gendering and Syrian alternative media spaces'. In: Maltby, Sarah and O'Loughlin, Ben and Parry, Katy and Roselle, Laura, (eds.), Spaces of War, War of Spaces. London: Bloomsbury, pp 143-158.
• Matar, Dina (2017) 'First Framing and News: Lessons from Reporting Jordan in Crises'. In: Harb, Zahera, (ed.), Reporting the Middle East: The Practices of News in the Twenty-First Century. London: I. B. Tauris, pp 33-49.

Middle East, especially the Arab world; international political communication; Arab cultural politics; Arab cultural studies; memory studies and oral history; Islamist  movements; social movements and media; diasporas; ethnic minorities; transnational movements and communications.