Atshan is Palestinian-American, was born in the United States, and identifies as Quaker.[2] He grew up in the West Bank, where he attended the Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank, as did several generations of his family. He was in high school during the Second Intifada.[2] In 2002, he moved to the United States to attend Swarthmore College for his undergraduate degree,[3][4] graduating in 2006.[5] He later earned a Master's in Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and then a PhD in Anthropology at Harvard University, under the supervision of Dr. Arthur Kleinman,[6] and was then a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University'sWatson Institute for International Studies.[7]
In the late 2000s, Atshan began volunteering with the Ramallah Friends School as a college counselor and mentor for students in their senior year.[2] He was a mentor to Kinnan Abdalhamid and Hisham Awartani.
In 2017, a planned speaking arrangement by Atshan at a Friends' Central School, a Quaker school in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, was cancelled after some parents complained that Atshan supported the BDS movement.[8][9] Two of the school's teachers, who invited Atshan on behalf of the school's Peace and Equality in Palestine club, were suspended.[8] Although the school later re-exetended the speaking invitation, Atshan declined, saying he would not speak at the school until they reinstated the suspended teachers.[7]
In 2018, Atshan's speaking engagement at the Jewish Museum Berlin was cancelled after comments from 2014 surfaced in which he called Israel an apartheid state.[10] Atshan's planned talk was titled "On Being Queer and Palestinian in East-Jerusalem", as part of the museum's exhibit on Jerusalem.[10] The talk ultimately took place and was hosted by the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) Berlin.[11]
Atshan is currently an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology and the Chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College, a historically Quaker private liberal arts college near Philadelphia.[1]
Atshan was hired at Emory University in 2021, and was tenured in January 2022, becoming the first tenured Palestinian professor at the university.[12]
During the 2020–2021 academic year, Atshan was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Senior Research Scholar in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.[4]
In 2020, Atshan was named one of Arab America Foundation's 40 Under 40.[13]
Atshan has also received awards such as the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, the Young Global Leader Award from the Council for the United States and Italy, the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, and he has been inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College.[14]
Atshan, Sa'ed; Galor, Katharina (2020). The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians. Duke University Press. ISBN978-1-4780-0785-2.[21][22][23][24]
Atshan, Sa’ed; Galor, Katharina (2021). Israelis, Palästinenser und Deutsche in Berlin (in German). De Gruyter. ISBN978-3-11-072993-1.[25]
Atshan, Saʼed; Galor, Katharina; Stuckrad, Kocku von (2021). Israelis, Palästinenser und Deutsche in Berlin: Geschichten einer komplexen Beziehung(1 ed.). Boston: De Gruyter. ISBN978-3-11-073439-3.
Atshan, Sa'ed; Galor, Katharina, eds. (2022). Reel gender: Palestinian and Israeli cinema. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN978-1-5013-9421-8.
Paradoxes of Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories (upcoming)
^Al-Kurdi, Ahmad (2022). "Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique: by Sa'ed Atshan, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2020, 296 pp, $90 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1503609945". Journal of Israeli History: 1–3. doi:10.1080/13531042.2021.2033451. S2CID246593150.
^Savcı, Evren (2021). "Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique". Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. 17 (1): 117–120. doi:10.1215/15525864-8790266. S2CID233852212.
^Hoad, Neville (2022). "Rehashed Liberalism, the Accusation of Radical Purity, and the Alibi of the "Personal"". GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 28 (2): 315–319. doi:10.1215/10642684-9608273.
^Lindholm, Helena (2022). "The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians . Sa'ed Atshan and Katharina Galor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 256 pp. $25.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0837-8". Journal of Anthropological Research. 78 (1): 144–145. doi:10.1086/717825. S2CID247267197.
^Younes, Anna-E. (2022). "The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians: by Sa'ed Atshan and Katharina Galor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 256 pages. $99.95 cloth, $25.95 paper". Journal of Palestine Studies: 1–3. doi:10.1080/0377919X.2022.2048607. S2CID248287342.