'The House of the Priest'

Sarah Irving is a Leverhulme early career research fellow and Lecturer at Staffordshire University and editor-in-chief of Contemporary Levant, a journal of the Council for British Research in the Levant. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2018 and has taught and researched at King’s College London and Leiden, Edge Hill and Linnaeus Universities. She is the author of a number of scholarly articles on the social history of Late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and on contemporary Arabic literature, and prior to her return to academia also authored a number of books on Palestine. Charbel Nassif is senior researcher within the ERC-Advanced project TYPARABIC and researcher at the CEDRAC (Centre de Documentation et de recherches arabes chrétiennes, Beirut). In 2018-2019, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University on the NWO funded project CrossRoads - Europeans’ Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Mandate Palestine (1918-1948). A Connected History, working on the Melkite community of Palestine. His research interests are focused on liturgical and iconographical heritage of the Melkite Church, correspondences between the Melkite Church and Rome and comparative history of Byzantine Churches in the modern period. Nassif has two PhDs: History of Art (University Paris IV–Sorbonne, 2017) and Theology (Catholic Institute of Paris, 2017). Karène Sanchez Summerer is Associate Professor at Leiden University. She obtained her PhDs from Leiden University and EPHE (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris Sorbonne). Her research considers the interactions between European linguistic and cultural policies and the Arab communities (1860-1948) in the Levant, missionaries' modalities and impact and Arab Catholic communities in Palestine. She is the PI of the research project (2017-2022), CrossRoads - A Connected History between Europeans’ Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Mandate Palestine (project funded by The Netherlands Research Council). She is the co-editor of the series Languages and Culture in History with W. Frijhoff, Amsterdam University Press. Her last publications include Sanchez Summerer, K. and S. Zananiri, Imaging and Imagining Palestine - Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (1918-1948) (Brill, 2021); Sanchez Summerer, K. & Papastathis, K., Contemporary Levant, special issue, Eastern Christianity in Syria and Palestine and European Cultural Diplomacy (1860-1948). A Connected History, vol. 6, issue 1, 2021.