Dr. Adel Manna is a historian of Palestine in the Ottoman period and of the Palestinians in the 20th century. Since 1980 he has taught in several Palestinian and Israeli universities, including Bir Zeit University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His fields of interest include the history of Jerusalem in the Ottoman period, Arab citizens of Israel, and the history of the Nakba and its continuing ramifications for the Palestinian people. In 1999 he joined the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute as director of the Center for the Study of Arab Society in Israel, and between 2009 and 2012 he was the director of the Center for the Training of Arab Teachers at Beit Berl Academic College.  

Dr. Manna has published 10 books and dozens of articles in his fields of specialization in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. His most recent book, The Nakba and Survival: The Story of the Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948–1956, was published in Hebrew in 2017 by the Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad. The previous year the book was published in Arabic by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, and it is forthcoming in English in the United States. For the past two years Dr. Manna has been working on a biography of Ahmad Hilmi Abd al-Baqi (1882–1963), the prime minister of the All-Palestine government in Gaza in 1948.