About
Charlotte Karem Albrecht: Interdisciplinary Scholar of Arab American History
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is an associate professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender 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 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 a 2024-25 LSA-LEAD (Leading for Equity and the Advancement of Diversity) Fellow at the University of Michigan. She previously served as Board Chair for Mizna (a Southwest Asian and North African arts organization) 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 historicist methods. She is in the early stages of a second book project that puts Arab American history in conversation with studies of U.S. settler colonialism, examining the varied relationships of Arab Americans to indigenous sovereignty.
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 minor in American Studies. Her work has been published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Gender & History, and the Journal of American Ethnic History. She lives in southeast Michigan with her partner and a small menagerie of cats and dogs. She loves to garden and is a longtime singer and violist.
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).
