About
Charlotte Karem Albrecht: Interdisciplinary Scholar of Arab American History
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Director of the Arab and Muslim America Studies program and an associate professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, the Global Islamic Studies Center, and the Program in Race, Law, and History. Her first book, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, was published open access with University of California Press and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Evelyn Shakir non-fiction category of the 2024 Arab American Book Awards. She is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and an Associate Editor for the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. She previously served as Board Chair for the arts organization Mizna and works closely with the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
Professor Karem Albrecht’s research interests include Arab American history, histories of gender and sexuality, relational ethnic studies, feminist theory, queer of color critique, and interdisciplinary methods. She is currently working on a hybrid creative arts-public history project that takes up difficult legacies in Arab American history and explores accountability and repair methodologically. The book examines historical illustrations of Arab participation in U.S. settler colonial dispossession, anti-Blackness and colorism, and the policing of gender and sexuality in a range of periodic, geographical, and ethnic contexts. Simultaneously, the book explores a parallel creative process of embroidering archival sources from these episodes with motifs from various Southwest Asian and North African embroidery traditions, in order to invite embodied community engagement with those stories.
Professor Karem Albrecht received a B.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies and in French from Rice University and a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, with a graduate certificate in American Studies. Her work has been published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Gender & History, and the Journal of American Ethnic History.
Visualizing Arab Americans in History
These photographs are of Lebanese immigrants and their descendants living in or around Louisville, Kentucky in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of them are my relatives. After migrating, they often called themselves “Syrians,” given that what we know today as Lebanon was then part of the Ottoman province of Syria, or Bilad al-Sham in Arabic. These migrants navigated a race- and class-stratified society that was tightly bound by norms of gender and sexuality. Syrians sought to maintain the ties of family, community, and spirituality upon which they depended as they variously incorporated and resisted the norms that were imposed upon them in the United States.
As well as being keepsakes for future generations, these photographs of leisure time and fancy dress are marks of real or aspirational class status, which was sutured to white supremacy. They are sites of memory, melancholy, fantasy, and grief. For more on the function of photographs in Arab American family and community archives, see the fourth chapter of my book, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling (University of California Press, 2023).
