From Forgotten Shores to a Port of Call: Ten Years at Mashriq & Mahjar

Stacy Fahrenthold is a historian of the modern Middle East specializing in labor migration; displacement/refugees; border studies; and diasporas within and from the region. Her award winning first book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora (Oxford, 2019) explores the war work of Arab emigres living in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, revealing the repercussions of their activism on the post-Ottoman Middle East. Her work also appears in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Global History, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, and other journals and edited volumes. Fahrenthold is now writing a new book on Syrian textile workers in the Americas (under contract).

Fahrenthold came to UC Davis in 2018, where in addition to the Department of History, she is affiliated with the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, the Global Migration Center, and the Human Rights Studies Program. She is Associate Editor of the journal Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle Eastern and North African Migration Studies, and a series editor with American University Press's Refugees and Migrants within the Middle East series.

Dr. Akram Khater is University Faculty Scholar, Professor of History, and holds the Khayrallah Chair in Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University, where he also serves as the Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. His books include Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Making of a Lebanese Middle Class, 1861–1921, and Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in the Christian Middle East. He has multiple documentaries including The Romey Lynchings, which narrates the history of racial violence against early Arab immigrants. In addition, he is the senior curator for several exhibits, the latest of which is Turath: An Exhibit of Early Arab American Culture. Through the Khayrallah Center, Khater has launched several digital humanities projects, which include Legacies of Labor: Lebanese Factory Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1890–1950, and Syrians in New York: Mapping Movement, 1900–1930. Most recently, he has been collaborating with colleagues from Statistics and Computer Science to develop the first Arabic OCR for historical publications and the largest repository of digitized Arabic American newspapers published in North and South America.