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
On April 4, Fresno State will host speakers from US CIS, a variety of organizations devoted to resettlement of Syrian refugees, as well as Dr. Keith Watenpaugh, historian of refugees and human rights at UC-Davis. The all-day event features expertise on all sides of the… Read More
22 December 2016: Fresno-area media outlet interviewed me for a short web video on the Syrian conflict and refugee resettlement in the Central Valley. The piece appears on GVWire.com and will be the first in a series dedicated to the covering Syrian asylees in Fresno. The… 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
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
