Hala Khamis Nassar (Discussion Moderator) is Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Culture and Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.  She studied at Birzeit University in Palestine, as well as in Scotland, in the US, and in Germany, where she did her PhD in theatre studies at the Free University of Berlin. She came to the US as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley.  She has published articles on Palestinian and Arab cultural productions and Palestinian theatre, and her articles have appeared in Arabic, Hebrew, German, English, and Italian.  Currently she is working on two manuscripts, one an anthology of Palestinian theatre and another on the Palestinian cultural perfor­mance of martyrdom. Nassar also has two forthcoming books this summer from Interlink Press: Mahmoud Darwish: An Exile's Poetand Performing Palestine: Origins and Visions of a National Theater.