The driving motivation for the project of building a reader for the field arose from our desire to provide scholars with the reader that we wished had existed—to support our research and later our teaching—as we were entering academia.
Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, and Amira Jarmakani
Louise Cainkar, she/they, is professor of sociology and social welfare and justice at Marquette University, in Milwaukee, and also director of the major in Peace Studies and minor in Arab and Muslim American Studies. She has published widely on Arab Americans and US Muslims in scholarly journals and books, as well as in public scholarship. She is co-editor with Suad Joseph and Michael Suleiman of Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal (2021, Syracuse University Press), which won an Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction book award from the Arab American National Museum. Her 2009 book, Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience after 9/11 (Russell Sage Foundation) was also honored as Outstanding Adult Non-Fiction by the Arab American National Museum. She is former President of the Arab American Studies Association and Board member of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies. She is active in community-based research and with Arab American and US Muslim community organizations.
Pauline Homsi Vinson is visiting assistant professor and interim director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (2022-2023). Her work includes translations from Arabic to English, Shakespeare, and Arab American literature, with attention to gender, race, and cross-cultural literary borrowings. She is co-editor of a number of special issues on Arab American literature and has taught in the United States, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates. Pauline has co-founded the Arab American Studies Association (AASA) and the Global Arab and Arab American Literature forum at the MLA. Originally from Lebanon, she holds an honors BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a PhD from Northwestern University. Her current project explores the subversive potential of storytelling in Arab American re-configurations of the 1001 Nights.
Amira Jarmakani, she/they, is professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at San Diego State University. She is the author of An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror (NYU press, 2015). She also authored Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), which won the National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa book prize. She is past-president of the Arab American Studies Association and a Series Advisor for the Critical Arab American Studies Series with Syracuse University Press.
