Philip Mattar is a Palestinian American

Palestinian American

Palestinian Americans are Americans of Palestinian ancestry. It is difficult to say when the first Palestinian immigrants arrived at the United States; however, many of the first immigrants to arrive were Christians escaping persecution from the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century...

 historian

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

, who is fluent in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 and Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

. Born in Jerusalem, He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in Middle Eastern history and has taught history at Yale

YALE

RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...

, Georgetown

Georgetown University

Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...

, and the City College of New York

City College of New York

The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...

. Mattar was a Fulbright scholar, a Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson Center (September 2001-August 2002), and a Senior Fellow at the
United States Institute of Peace

United States Institute of Peace

The United States Institute of Peace was created by Congress as a non-partisan, federal institution that works to prevent or end violent conflict around the world...

 (October 2002-July 2003). He is the President of the Palestinian American Research Center in Washington D.C. and was executive director of the Institute for Palestine Studies

Institute for Palestine Studies

The Institute for Palestine Studies is the oldest independent non-profit, public service, research institute in the Arab world, was established and incorporated in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1963 and has since served as a model for other such institutes in the region...

 from 1984 to 2001.

Mattar's 1988 book, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement, was "the first full-length biography" of Amin al-Husayni. Mattar has also published in Foreign Policy, Middle East Journal and Middle Eastern Studies and was one of the experts featured on National Public Radio's seven-part series, "The Mideast: A Century of Conflict," in 2002.

Major works

• Author. The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement. Columbia University Press. 1988, 1992.
• Co-editor. Encyclopedia of the modern Middle East. Macmillan Reference USA. 1996.
• Editor. Encyclopedia of the Palestinians. Facts on File. 2000, 2005.
• Co-editor. Encyclopedia of the modern Middle East and North Africa. Thomson Gale/Macmillan Reference USA. 2004.