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