Professor Dina Matar

Dina Matar is professor political communication and Arab Media at SOAS. Her research and teaching are focused on the intersection of politics and communication; media and conflict; cultural politics; diasporas; activist cultures and media and memory studies, focusing on the Middle East. She is co-founder the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (MEJCC). She served as an editor with the Media, War and Conflict Journal (2021-2023) and serves on the editorial collective of Communication, Culture and Critique Journal.  She is the author of What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood (2010); co-author of The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication (2012); co-editor of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East (2013); Gaza as Metaphor (2016), Producing Palestine (2024) and Archiving Gaza in the Present (2025). Matar is co-editor of Political Communication in the Middle East and North Africa series and the SOAS Palestine Studies series. Matar has published widely in books and journals. Before joining academia in 2005, Matar worked as a foreign correspondent and editor with international news organizations in the Middle East, London and Hong Kong. 

• 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.