June 4 2019: a new piece I wrote for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia went live this week, on labor migrants from Ottoman Syria, Mount Lebanon, and Palestine to the Americas. The piece sums up the state of the field in mahjar studies for an introductory… Read More
2 March 2018: my review of Jeffrey Grey’s 2016 book, The War with the Ottoman Empire, appears in the current issue of the International Journal of Turkish Studies. The book is part of an Oxford series on the Great War in Australian history (full text available here). From the review: Proceeding… Read More
5 August 2017- my review of Maria Narbona, Paulo Pinto, and John Karam’s edited collection, Crescent over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino USA appears in the current issue of the Journal of American Ethnic History. (full text available here). From the review: Despite five… Read More
27 March 2017: a new brief piece of mine on teaching migration and refugee history appears on IEHS ONLINE, the website of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. My Spring 2017 course, Migrants and Refugees in the Middle East, meets Tuesday evenings, and it seems like… Read More
8 February 2017: Tropics of Meta: Historiography for the Masses has published my brief piece on Donald Trump’s 2017 Executive Order in relationship to the first “Muslim Ban” in American history: Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s Executive Order 2932 (1918). The piece can be read at this link: https://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2017/02/08/what-we-can-learn-from-americas-other-muslim-ban-back-in-1918/ From the… Read More
3 November 2016: a new digital sourcebook on the cultural history of World War I includes two Arab American sources that I contributed and introduced. The sourcebook is among the publications of a three year project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) and… Read More
30 May 2016: last November I met with asylum officers at US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) to give a historical briefing of the Syrian conflict and to discuss the Syrian refugee movement. The meeting was facilitated by UC Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies,… Read More
10 February 2016: my newest article, Former Ottomans in the ranks: pro-Entente military recruitment among Syrians in the Americas, 1916–18,” has appeared in the March 2016 issue of the Journal of Global History. (For full text, click here). Abstract: “For half a million ‘Syrian’ Ottoman subjects living… Read More
3 August 2014: I’ve written a brief piece on Syrian American soldiers and the challenges (and rewards!) of writing transnational microhistories for the NEH summer seminar website on WWI in the Middle East. The post, on a soldier named Gabriel Ilyas Ward, can be viewed… Read More
1 April 2014: pleased to announce that the International Journal of Middle East Studies has published my article, “Sound Minds in Sound Bodies: Transnational Philanthropy and Patriotic Masculinity in al-Nadi al-Homsi and Syrian Brazil.” The article appears in a special issue on the Politics of Benevolence, co-edited… Read More
