Prof. Yossef Rapoport

An historian of the social, cultural, and legal aspects of life in the Islamic Middle East in the late medieval period.

He trained at Tel Aviv University, Princeton, and Oxford before joining Queen Mary University of London in 2008. His books include Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Islamic Maps (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2019), and Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East (Princeton UP, 2025). He is a founding member of A Land for All and served as the academic director of the Palestine–Israel Union Research Unit at the Centre for Arab Progress, London (2022–2023).

Professor Rapoport has written and lectured extensively on the history of Palestine-Israel and the Balfour Declaration for outlets such as +972 Magazine, OpenDemocracy, and the QMUL Public History Unit. He combines his historical training with a commitment to a shared land through teaching an undergraduate class on the history of Byzantine and Islamic Palestine (300–1800 CE).