Amy Fallas is a historian of the modern and transnational Middle East and her research focuses on histories of infrastructure and social welfare, ethnic and religious minorities in the eastern Mediterranean, and transhemispheric mobilities between the Middle East and Latin America. She received her MA in History from Yale University and her PhD in History from University of California, Santa Barbara. Amy's academic scholarship is published in peer reviewed journals such as History Compass, Christian–Muslim Relations, and the Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her public-facing work has appeared in The Washington Post, Jadaliyya, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, Mada Masr, the New Arab, the Revealer, Sojourners, Contingent Magazine, and more.

 

Her book manuscript "Their Own Poor: Communal Identity, Charitable Societies, and the Making of Sectarianism in Modern Egypt” offers a new approach to the social history of sectarianism in Egypt through local and global nodes of philanthropy from the late 19th to mid 20th century. "Their Own Poor” examines how a network of sect-based charitable societies mediated inter-religious tensions in modern Egypt through social service, medical infrastructure, scientific knowledge production, and urban interventions. This work has been generously supported by the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University, and others. 

 

“The First Duty of Charity”: Medical Philanthropy, Sectarian Infrastructures, and Legacies of the Coptic Hospital in Twentieth Century Cairo. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2025) 45 (1): 180–189.

 

“Death of a Prime Minister: The Assassination of Boutros Ghali and Mediating Sectarianism in Egypt, 1906–1911.” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations (2024) 35 (2): 117–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2024.2406687

 

"Charity and Philanthropy in Middle East History." History Compass (2023) 21 (3-4): 12760. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12760