About the speaker: Ayat Hamdan is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. Her doctoral thesis is entitled ‘Silent Displacement in Occupied Palestine’. She holds a BA in History and Political Science and an MA in Islamic Arab History from Birzeit University. She also works as a teaching assistant in the political science department of the University of Exeter. She is currently a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the Editorial Secretary of the Ostour journal for historical studies.