Introduction: Vocabularies of Travel and Tourism in the "Holy Lands," 1870–1950

Sarah Irving is Lecturer in International History and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Staffordshire University, the latter an investigation of the 1927 Jericho earthquake and its impacts. Her research focuses on subaltern social and cultural histories of Palestine and the wider Levant in the Late Ottoman and Mandate periods. She is the author or editor of a number of books on the region, most recently The Social and Cultural History of Palestine: Essays in Honour of Salim Tamari (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She is also editor-in-chief of Contemporary Levant, a journal of the Council for British Research in the Levant.

Karène Sanchez Summerer is Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Groningen University, The Netherlands. Her research and teaching interests include Christian Arab communities of and in the Middle East, a relational cultural and social history of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, and minorities in diaspora from the Middle East. From 2017 to 2022, she was the principal investigator of the research project (2018–2022), "CrossRoads- A connected history between Europeans’ cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Mandate Palestine" (project funded by The Dutch Research Council NWO), and from 2017–2021, co-principal investigator of MisSMO consortium project ("Christian missions and societies in the Middle East 19th–20th centuries"). She is the co-editor of the series Languages and Culture in History with Willem Frijhoff (Amsterdam University Press). Her last publications include the following works: Imaging and Imagining Palestine- Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (1918–1948) (with Sary Zananiri; Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2021); Europeans’ Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christianity in Mandate Palestine: Between Contention and Connection (with Sary Zananiri; Palgrave MacMillan, 2021); and The House of the Priest: A Palestinian Life (1885–1954) (With Sarah Irving and Charbeel Nassif; Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2022).

Sary Zananiri is an artist and cultural historian. He completed a PhD in Fine Arts at Monash University in 2014 looking at the biblified imaging of the Palestinian landscape. His research interests sit at the intersection of nationalism, colonialism, indigeneity, religious narrative and visual culture, with a particular focus on photography.

He has co-edited two volumes, Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (Brill, 2021) and European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine: Between Contention and Connection, (Palgrave McMillan, 2021) with Karène Sanchez Summerer. He is currently writing a monograph, Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (IB Tauris, forthcoming 2024).

Recent exhibitions include the Qattan Foundation; University of Groningen Library (2023); INALCO, Paris (June–July 2022); the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival, Tunis (September 2022); the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (December 2021–February 2022); the National Glass Museum, Wagga Wagga (July–November 2021); Rijksmuseum Oudheden, Leiden (May–October 2020); and Der Haus Der Kunst der Welt for ALMS, Berlin (June 2019).

He was a postdoctoral fellow on the NWO funded project "CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine 1918–1948" and the Netherlands Institute for the Near East at Leiden University. He is an honorary fellow of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, a visiting scholar at Dar al Kalima, and from June 2023 will be a postdoctoral researcher at De Montfort University, UK.