Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class

Stacy Fahrenthold is a historian of the modern Middle East specializing in labor migration; displacement/refugees; border studies; and diasporas within and from the region. Her first book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, received the Arab American National Museum's 2020 Evelyn Shakir Award, the 2019 Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies, the 2019 Syrian Studies Association's Book Award, and received Honorable Mention by the Lebanese Studies Association in 2020. Her new book, Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class, examines how Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian immigrant workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation in the textile industries of the Atlantic world.

Fahrenthold is Associate Editor of Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle Eastern and North African Migration Studies, and a series editor of Refugees and Migrants within the Middle East (American University of Cairo Press). At UC Davis, she chairs the UC Davis Graduate Program in History and is Affiliate Faculty with the Middle East and South Asian Studies Program. She is also a 2024-27 College of Letters & Sciences Dean's Faculty Fellow.