Stacy D. Fahrenthold

Education

• Ph.D. History, Northeastern University
• M.A. History, Northeastern University
• B.A. History, Georgia State University

About

Stacy Fahrenthold is a historian of the modern Middle East specializing in labor migration, displacement, refugees, and diasporas within and from the region. She is jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, and is Associate Editor of Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle Eastern and North African Migration Studies. She is currently co-leading (with Rana Jaleel) a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, "Academic Freedom from Below" (2026-27), and recently completed a curriculum project, "The Middle East in Historical Context" (2024-25), funded by the UC Office of the President. Fahrenthold's research in Middle Eastern diasporas has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is currently a UC Davis College of Letters & Sciences Dean's Faculty Fellow.

Research Focus

Professor Fahrenthold's research examines social movements, labor activism, and diaspora political mobilization among Middle Eastern migrants in the Americas. She is the author of two books: 2024's Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class, examines how Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation in the textile industries of the Atlantic world, and was awarded the Middle East Studies Association's 2025 Nikki Keddie Award for "outstanding scholarly work in religion, revolution, and/or society" and the 2026 David Montgomery Award by the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association. Her first book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora (2019), examines the politics of Syrian and Lebanese migration to the Americas during the First World War. It received the Arab American National Museum's Evelyn Shakir Award, the Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies, and Syrian Studies Association Book Prize. Fahrenthold is currently at work on a new book on Middle Eastern refugees arriving in the United States before 1951.

Select Publications

Books

• Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class. Stanford University Press, Worlding the Middle East series, 2024. 
• Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Articles

• “Coda: Do They Strike There? Class and the Counterarchive in the Syrian Mahjar.” In “Atlantic Crossings,” eds. Agnes Gehbald, Philipp Horne, and Rea Vogt, Comparativ 35, no. 1/2 (2025): 146-150.
• “Return Migration and Repatriation: Myths and Realities in the Interwar Syrian Mahjar.” Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas, eds. Dalia Abdelhady and Ramy Aly, 301-315. Routledge, 2022.
• “Ladies Aid as Labor History: Working Class Formation in the Mahjar.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 17, no. 3 (2021): 326-347. 
• “‘Claimed by Turkey as Subjects’: Ottoman Migrants, Foreign Passports, and Syrian Nationality in the Americas, 1915-1925.” In The Subjects of Ottoman International Law, eds. Lâle Can, Michael Christopher Low, Kent F. Schull, and Robert Zens, 216-237. University of Indiana Press, 2020.
• “Arab Labor Migration in the Americas, 1880-1930.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Oxford University Press, 2019.
• “Former Ottomans in the Ranks: Pro-Entente Military Recruitment among Syrians in the Americas, 1916-1918.” Journal of Global History 11, no. 1 (2016): 88-112.
• “Sound Minds in Sound Bodies: Transnational Philanthropy and Patriotic Masculinity in al-Nadi al-Homsi and Syrian Brazil, 1920-1932.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no. 2 (2014): 259-283.
• “Transnational Modes and Media: The Syrian Press in the Mahjar and Emigrant Activism during World War I.” Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies 1, no. 1 (2013): 32-57.

Teaching and Advising

Fahrenthold teaches introductory surveys in Middle East history and Global Migration, and upper division courses on the modern Middle East, Middle East-South Asia connections, and migration, refugees, partition, and global borderlands. Her courses include Modern Palestine/Israel (HIS 113), Histories of 20th Century Partition (HIS 114); The Modern Middle East, 1750-1914 (193A); and The Modern Middle East, 1914-present (HIS 193B). She offers graduate seminars in modern Middle East history, Arab and Arab American studies, and diasporas in Middle East, South Asian, and African histories.

Awards

• Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, “Academic Freedom from Below: Rethinking the Social Role of the University and the Meaning of Shared Governance," 2026-27
• David Montgomery Award, Organization of American Historians and Labor and Working-Class Association, 2026
• Nikki Keddie Book Award, Middle East Studies Association, 2025
• UC Davis College of Letters & Sciences Dean's Faculty Fellowship, 2024-27
• UC Davis Humanities and Social Sciences Stimulating Exceptional and Essential Discovery (SEED) Grant, 2024-25
• University of California Office of the President, "The Middle East in Historical Context," (in partnership with the California History Social Science Project), 2024-25
• UC Davis Humanities Institute Research Cluster Grant, 2023-24
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2021-22
• UC Davis Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship, 2021
• Arab American Book Award, Evelyn Shakir Award for Non-Fiction, 2020
• Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies, 2019
• Syrian Studies Association Book Prize, 2019
• Honorable Mention, Lebanese Studies Association Book Prize, 2020
• American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2013-2014