Stacy D. Fahrenthold (Department of History)

Arab Americans contributed to strike practices we see as quintessentially American. In her book, Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class, Assistant History Professor Stacy Fahrenthold unravels the history of Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian immigrants’ activism in the global textile industry and labor strikes.

Stacy D. Fahrenthold (Department of History)

Also by Fahrenthold, this award-winning book illuminates the role that Syrian and Lebanese migrants in the United States and Latin America played in Middle East state formation around the period of World War I. Between the Ottomans and the Entente provides context for the flight of millions of Syrian refugees today.

Sunaina Marr Maira (Department of Asian American Studies) 

Young people of South Asian, Afghan and Arab descent growing up in a post-9/11 world feel constantly under suspicion and surveillance. Their lives are the focus of the 2016 book The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror by Asian American Studies Professor Sunaina Marr Maira.

Sunaina Marr Maira (Department of Asian American Studies) 

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) expanded rapidly in the United States in the 2010s. The academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions is a key component of this movement. What is this boycott? In this short essential book, Maira situates the academic boycott in the broader history of boycotts in the U.S. and Palestine, and shows how the movement has evolved. Boycott! explores the movement's broader implications and relevant context.

Keith David Watenpaugh (Department of Religious Studies) 

In Bread from Stones: The Middle East & The Making of Modern Humanitarianism, Religious Studies Professor Keith David Watenpaugh, analyzes genocide and mass violence, human trafficking and the forced displacement of millions in the Eastern Mediterranean as the background for this exploration of humanitarianism’s role in the history of human rights.

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh (Department of Art History)

The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript from Genocide to Justice traces eight illustrated pages from a 13th-century Armenian manuscript that disappeared in 1920 to their purchase by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1995. A 2010 lawsuit against the Getty demanding the pages be returned to the Armenian Church set off her search that is set against larger issues of the Armenian Genocide.

Noha M. Radwan (Department of Comparative Literature)

Comparative Literature Professor Noha M. Radwan offers the first book-length study of the emergence, context, and development of modern Egyptian colloquial poetry, recently used as a vehicle for communications in the revolutionary youth movement in Egypt on January 25th 2011, and situates it among modernist Arab poetry.

Talinn Grigor (Department of Art and Art History) and Houri Berberian (UC Irvine)

With this book, Art History Professor Talinn Grigor and UC Irvine Professor Houri Berberian offer the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women's organizations, the authors trace minoritarian politics and the shifting relationships among doubly minoritized Armenian female subjects, Iran's central nodes of power, and the Irano-Armenian patriarchal institutions of church and political parties.

Suad Joseph, a distinguished research professor in anthropology at UC Davis, has built a career of studying representations of Muslim women across decades and media, focusing primarily on print news media. This work culminated in her role as founding editor of an encyclopedia on Islam and women that today is the only reference of its kind in the world.

Hostility for people in opposing political parties in the U.S. has been increasing for decades. Research in political science is at the frontier of more detailed measures of polarization that show what drives those feelings. This research provides insight on what might change the course of the nation.