Stacy Fahrenthold, a professor of history, has been awarded the 2026 David Montgomery Award for her book Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class. The book also won the 2025 Nikkie Keddie Award.
The violence that erupted in Gaza in 2023 changed the political climate of teaching the Middle East in schools across the U.S. The UC Davis California History-Social Science Project has released new materials that teachers everywhere can use to confidently teach the history of both the Middle East and of Arab Americans.
Welcome to Books of the Month, a book club curated monthly with works from authors within the College of Letters & Science at UC Davis. This April, we honor Arab American Heritage Month with selections highlighting activist history within Arab American communities and abroad, as well as multiple cultural histories.
In a new book, historian Stacy Fahrenthold unravels the history of Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian immigrants’ activism in the global textile industry and labor strikes. Her book reveals how women garment workers, child laborers and union activists struggled against white and even Arab American bosses, as well as why their impact has gone ignored.
A scholar examining the portrayal of the pregnant and postpartum body in maternal narratives of the Hispanic world, a historian examining the Middle Eastern diaspora in the Golden State and a chemist investigating the role of metal micronutrients in human health have been named 2024 Dean’s Faculty Fellows.
