The Critical SWANA (Southwest Asian/North African) Studies cluster in
the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity Presents

Queering Critical SWANA Studies
with Mejdulene Shomali and Charlotte Karem Albrecht

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She will discuss her forthcoming book, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press 2023), which examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between
Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film.

Charlotte Karem Albrecht is an assistant professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies and a faculty member for the Arab and
Muslim American Studies program at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. She will discuss her forthcoming book, Possible Histories:
Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling (University of California Press, 2023) chronicling the migration of Syrians to the US in
the 1870's who worked as peddlers. This book proposes a new understanding Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of US racial systems.

Co-sponsored by the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity and the Consortium on Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Public Culture