Mekarem Eljamal is a PhD candidate in urban planning at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Eljamal’s research looks to the details and enactments of Palestinian future imaginaries as a lens through which to understand the instability of settler colonialism and its planning regimes. Exploring future imaginaries in Lydd, Eljamal traces the entanglements and materialities that are constructed as part of and mobilized towards enacting the future in the present. Eljamal is currently the Managing Editor for the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative of the Arab Studies Institute and an Affiliate Editor for History@Work, the blog for the National Council on Public History. Eljamal holds a BA from the University of Michigan in International studies and Middle Eastern and North African studies, as well as masters degrees in Middle Eastern and North African studies and in Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Michigan.