Prof. Khaled Furani is an associate professor of Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His research interests include social theory, modernity, language and literature, secularism, Palestine, and the history of anthropology. His ethnography Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry appeared in 2012 (Stanford University Press), and his book Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science, which examines the relations between anthropology and theology, appeared in 2019 (Oxford University Press). In his research Prof. Furani tries to imagine what a Palestinian critique of the concept of modern sovereignty might produce.

At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Prof. Furani heads two research groups: The first, the Critical Incubator, aims to provide intellectual and practical support to Palestinian students for advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences at Israeli universities; The second, Arabic and the Challenge of Thought, seeks to reconstruct and reveal ways in which the Arabic language can act as a tool for conveying wisdom that is mobile and cross-cultural to encourage profound thinking despite the darkness of the colonial situation of our time.