Dissertation Title: "Routes of Race: Migrations between Greater Syria, Mandate Lebanon, and the United States 1881-1945"
Abstract: My dissertation re-creates the lives of migrants traveling from Greater Syria (what is now Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine) to North America as they confronted Ottoman, European, and U.S. sites of imperial power. My research practice follows migrants' journeys, visiting archives along their itineraries in Lebanon, France, Mexico, and the United States. I reveal that shipping routes, port cities, borders, and universities through which Syrians traveled held the sites where gender and race were deployed, internalized, and made meaningful for both Syrian migrants and those who policed them. The economies that Syrians encountered not only affected how they traveled, but also the way they experienced race and gender after they arrived in the United States. My study dwells in the scattered sites on migrants’ itineraries to understand how the economies of migration affected Syrian migrants, and also produced “authoritative” knowledge about them as they settled in the United States.