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
22 January 2018: I’ve posted a reflection on microhistory in the Syrian mahjar over at Medium. Based on the life of one Syrian migrant living in Boston, the piece considers how the pursuit of individual stories can challenge the expectations of nationalist histories and area studies alike. From… Read More
12 December 2017: a friend recently discovered an image of Syrian American U.S. Army translator George Abraham Matook, a figure who plays a major role in chapter 3 of my forthcoming book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente. Born in Boston, Massachusetts to Syrian parents, George Matook… 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
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
3 March 2016: today I deliver a talk at Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies as part of their ongoing Sultan Lecture Series. The talk is titled “War Stories: World War I and the Ottoman Arab Diaspora” and caps off my year as a visiting… 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
24 January 2016: I gave a talk at the Cultural Encounters in Global Conflict conference on the First World War at Kings College London. My talk, “Becoming ‘Syrian’ on the battlefield: Ottoman emigrant troops on the Western Front” detailed the experience of Syrian recruits in… 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
28 February 2013: my first peer-reviewed article has appeared in the journal, Mashriq and Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies. The publication is a new journal put out quarterly by the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies and the History Department at North Carolina State… Read More
