June 21 2019: this week, New Books Network featured Between the Ottomans and the Entente on their Middle East Studies podcast. Host Joshua Donovan and I discuss the book’s contributions to the fields of migration studies and new histories of the First World War, as… Read More
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
23 April 2018: Next month I will visit the Middle East Center at the University of Washington in Seattle to talk about the French Mandate’s use of passports to claim Syrian and Lebanese migrants living abroad for political purposes after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.… Read More
17 June 2017- my interview with CSPAN3’s American History TV ran today on Syrian migrants in the United States during the First World War. The interview took place at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in April in a series of tapings to commemorate the centenary of… 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
22 November 2016: pleased to share that my 2014 dissertation, Making Nations in the Mahjar, has been awarded the Syrian Studies Association’s 2016 dissertation award for best new work on Syria. SSA Prize Committee Chair Charles Wilkins made the announcement at this year’s Middle East Studies… Read More
18 November 2016: was happy to deliver remarks on confronting the archival challenges posed by the ongoing Syrian conflict at part of a special roundtable organized by Hilary Kalmbach (Sussex) at the Syrian Studies Association’s sectional meeting at this year’s MESA meeting in Boston. The… 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
