Katharina Galor
Brown University
BGC Fellow

Innocent Knowledge: Israeli and Palestinian Children’s Drawings as Material Culture
How do we look at a child’s drawing when we know so little about the child who made it? Innocent Knowledge brings together nearly 400 drawings made by children in Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, many of them living amid war and displacement. Galor will explore how different ways of displaying these drawings—including a digital archive and exhibitions—shape what we see, and what responsibilities come with showing them.

Katharina Galor is a scholar of visual and material culture whose research examines heritage, identity, and memory in Israel-Palestine. Trained in art history and archaeology, she studies how images, objects, and built environments shape cultural and political narratives across Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions from antiquity to the present. She teaches in the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University and is affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies. She is the author and editor of several scholarly books, including Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology between Science and Ideology (2017, University of California Press), The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (2020; co-authored with Sa’ed Atshan, Duke University Press), and Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency (2023, Routledge). Her most recent book, Out of Gaza: A Tale of Love, Exile, and Friendship (2025, Potomac Books), explores exile, cross-cultural friendship, and the human dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and received the Grand Prize Gold Award for Overall Nonfiction from the Reader Views Literary Awards and an Award of Excellence from the Religion Communicators Council Wilbur Awards. A French edition, Fuir Gaza: Amour, exil et amitié, will appear in 2026 with Éditions Edern.

Tuesday, October 6, 12:15 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Tea, coffee, and snacks will be served starting at noon.
No registration required.