Nancy Hawker has been travelling to the Middle East since 1998 and lived there for several years. She has researched the languages and politics of Arabic speakers who are in contact with Hebrew. Her latest book on the subject is The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for citizenship (2019). You can hear about it here if you're interested. Besides sociolinguistics, she has studied social and political theory, and Arab and Israeli histories and literatures, and has worked for human rights in the region. She knows Arabic, Czech, English, French and Hebrew. Now she is learning about growing olive trees in conflict zones.