Akram Khater - Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies
In this conversation, we talked to Dr. Akram Khater about his work as a professor of history, and as the director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies.
About Akram Khater
Dr. Akram Khater is University Faculty Scholar, Professor of History, and holds the Khayrallah Chair in Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University where he also serves as the Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. His books include “Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Making of a Lebanese Middle Class”, “A History of the Middle East: A Sourcebook for the History of the Middle East and North Africa”, and “Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in the Christian Middle East”. He has produced Cedars in the Pines, a PBS documentary on the history of the Lebanese community in North Carolina, and is the senior curator for a museum exhibit on the same topic. He also curated the traveling exhibit, The Lebanese in America. He has just completed a new award winning documentary titled The Romey Lynchings, that narrates the history of racial violence against early Arab immigrants. In addition, he is the senior curator for Turath: An Exhibit of Early Arab American Culture. Through the Khayrallah Center, Khater has launched several digital humanities projects, these include Legacies of Labor: Lebanese Factory Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1890-1950, and Syrians in New York: Mapping Movement, 1900-1930. Most recently, he has been collaborating with colleagues from Statistics and Computer Science to develop the first Arabic OCR for historical publications, and the largest repository of digitized Arabic archive. He is the past editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and current editor of Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migrations, and sits on the editorial board of a book series on immigration studies.
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