Book Talk: Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling by Charlotte Karem Albrecht

March 9th, 2023 | 3:00 PM ET | Virtual Event: https://bit.ly/PHRSVP23


Join us for the book launch of Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling by Dr. Charlotte Karem Albrecht on March 9th at 3 PM ET. Dr. Karem Albrecht will discuss how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their networks of labor and care appeared in discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. The book launch will feature a presentation by Dr. Charlotte Karem Albrecht, in conversation with Dr. Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.


Charlotte Karem Albrecht is an Assistant Professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she is also a core faculty member for the Arab and Muslim American Studies program and affiliated faculty for the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Her research interests include Arab American history, histories of gender and sexuality, women of color feminist theory, queer of color critique, and interdisciplinary historicist methods. Her first book, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, was recently published with the University of California Press and is also available as an open-access e-book. Karem Albrecht holds a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her work has also been published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Gender & History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and multiple edited collections.

Nayan Shah is a historian whose books uncover how people struggle with incarceration, migration, and illness in the United States and across the globe. His latest book Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (University of California Press, 2022) is the first global history of hunger strikes as a tactic in prisons, conflicts, and protest movements. He also wrote *Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown and Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West. Shah is a Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at USC.

This event is brought to you by the Global Islamic Studies Center and co-sponsored by Arab and Muslim American Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, the Institute for Research on Women & Gender (IRWG), Middle East Studies, the Department of History, and Women's and Gender Studies.

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