Falestin Naïli is a historian specializing in the social history of late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and Jordan. She has focused much of her recent research on local governance and politics, particularly in Jerusalem.  Through her interest in collective memory and oral history she often reaches present-time issues, including the politics of heritage.

She was a core team member of the ERC project « Opening Jerusalem’s Archives » before joining the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo) Amman as a researcher and head of office between 2017 and 2020.

Her Ph.D. thesis, defended in Aix-en-Provence in 2007, deals with the history of the village of Artas south of Bethlehem in the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century and with the collective memory of this period among villagers and descendants of Europeans who settled in the village. It was published by Karthala (Paris) in 2022 under the title La Palestine entre Patrimoine et Providence : imaginaires bibliques et mémoire au village d’Artâs, XIX et XX siècles.

In her other publications, Falestin Naïli has dealt with urban governance in Jerusalem, millenarist settlement and missionary projects in Palestine, forced migration in the contemporary Middle East, early ethnographies of Palestine, and collective memory and heritage issues in these contexts.

In 2023, Dr. Falestin Naïli has received a Consolidator Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, leading to her current project "Futures Interrupted: social pluralism and political projects beyond coloniality and the nation-state". 

• « The De-Municipalization of Urban Governance: Post-Ottoman Political Space in Jerusalem », Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 76, 2018, pp. 8-23, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/233116
• with A. Muhtadi, « Back into the Imperial Fold: The End of Egyptian Rule through the Court Records of Jerusalem, 1839-1840 », in Angelos Dalachanis & Vincent Lemire (ed.), Ordinary Jerusalem 1840-1940, Leiden, Brill, 2018, pp. 186-199, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004375741_013
• « Chronique d’une mort annoncée : la municipalité ottomane de Jérusalem dans la tourmente de la Première Guerre Mondiale », Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, no. 141, 2017, pp. 171-190
• with Y. Avci & V. Lemire, « Publishing Jerusalem's Ottoman Municipal Archives (1892-1917): A Turning Point for the City's Historiography », Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 60, 2015, pp. 110-119, www.palestine-studies.org/jq/fulltext/187215
• « Memories of Home and Stories of Displacement: The Women of Artas and the “Peasant Past”», Journal of Palestine Studies, no. 152, Summer 2009, pp. 63-74, http://www.palestine-studies.org/journals.aspx?id=10477&jid=1&href=abstract
• « Les déplacés de 1967 : des réfugiés en devenir ? », in A. Signoles/ J. Al Husseini (dir.), Les Palestiniens entre Etat et diaspora. Le temps des incertitudes, Paris : IISMM/ Karthala, 2012, pp. 67-94