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Maayan Hilel named a 2025–2026 recipient of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship

April 30, 2025

Project: Leisure and Pleasure in Mandate Palestine: Everyday Life and the Politics of Culture

Leisure and Pleasure in Mandate Palestine examines how the rise of modern leisure culture—cafés, cinemas, beaches, cabarets, and sports clubs—shaped socio-cultural transformation, collective identities, and intercommunal relations in urban Palestine under British rule. Drawing on multilingual and underutilized sources, the book highlights leisure as a key arena of cultural production, everyday recreational practices, and political expression by ordinary people. It situates Palestinian society within regional and transnational cultural networks, offering new insights into modernity and mass culture in the Middle East.