Bostock, Sahar

Sahar Bostock is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the impact of development projects on the people and environment of Southern Palestine during the late Ottoman period and under the British Mandate. She is particularly interested in the ways in which urban planning, transportation networks, and communication technologies shaped daily life in the desert and the interactions between Palestinian Bedouins, fellahin, urbanites, and Zionist settlers. Her previous work examined Palestinian practices of radio listening during the British Mandate and listeners’ discourse on the Palestine Broadcasting Service (1936-1948). 

Her article “Radio Listenership in Palestinian Society: Reshaping Cultural Practices and Political Debate under the British Mandate, 1930–1948” was published in Contemporary Levant in 2022.

Before coming to Columbia, Sahar was an Arabic teacher, developed digital materials for teaching Arabic and Hebrew, and promoted the study of spoken Arabic in schools, universities, and private organizations in Israel.