Dr. Helga Tawil-Souri is Associate Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication and in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. She is also the Director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. Her work deals with issues of technology, media, culture, territory and politics in the Middle East, and especially Palestine-Israel. She has researched and written on Arab media; Palestinian cinema, television, video games and popular culture; on telecommunications and internet infrastructure and development in the Palestinian Territories; as well as on cultural/territorial politics in Palestine-Israel including analyzing checkpoints as cultural and economic spaces, identification cards as material artifacts and territorially-bordering mechanisms. Most recently she co-edited Gaza as Metaphor (Hurst 2016).