A historian working on the social and urban history of late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. Her main research interest is the history of ethnically and nationally mixed spaces and communities, especially during times of war and conflict. Her first book is entitled From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse University Press, 2011). Her second book, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine (Brandeis/New England University Press, 2016), is co-authored with Dr. Moshe Naor.

Jacobson completed her PhD at the Department of History at the University of Chicago. Before joining the Hebrew University she was the Academic Director of the Borders and Sovereignty theme (previously The Mediterranean Neighbors Unit) at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She is the chief editor of the Journal of Levantine Studies (JLS) published at VLJI. She has been a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University; a lecturer at the Department of History at MIT; a visiting lecturer at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University; and a lecturer at the International School at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (IDC).