Dahlia El Zein
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About
Dahlia El Zein is a historian of the modern Middle East and Africa. She is an assistant professor in residence in the Liberal Arts Program. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern and African History from the University of Pennsylvania with a certificate in Africana Studies. She received her MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.
El Zein’s research explores the intersections of race, gender, migration, and empire between the Eastern Mediterranean and West Africa in colonial and postcolonial contexts. She is particularly interested in teaching/learning (and unlearning) the histories of the Middle East from a Global South perspective, connecting it to other parts of the historic Third World, particularly Africa. Her current book project, tentatively titled Dakar–Beirut: Race and Empire in French West Africa and the Levant (1920–1960), examines race-making from below, from the perspective of West African colonial soldiers and Lebanese Syrian migrants within the context of the French Empire, as it remade both modern-day Senegal and Lebanon in the early-to-mid twentieth century.
She has previously taught history courses on the Middle East and Immigration at a Princeton University pre-college summer program. She also worked for the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University and in human rights for several years before that, covering the MENA region.
Research
- 19th and 20th century Middle East and Africa
- Transregional and Transnational histories between the Eastern Mediterranean and West Africa
- South-South Cross-Colonial Encounters
- Race, Racial Identity, and Anti-Blackness in Arab and African spaces
- French Colonialism and Empire
- Global South Migrations and Diaspora
- Women and Gender
Teaching
- History of the Modern Middle East
- Understanding Historical Sources
Publications/Scholarship
Dahlia El Zein, “From Shi’a to White: Race and Colonialism in Kamel Murouwwa’s Nahnu Fi Ifriqiya,” Mashriq & Mahjar 12, no. 1 (Forthcoming, Winter 2025).
Dahlia El Zein, “Politique des races: The Racialization of Lebanese Syrian Migrants in French West Africa,” POMEPS 52 (May 2024) https://pomeps.org/politique-des-races-the-racialization-of-lebanese-syrian-migrants-in-french-west-africa.
Dahlia El Zein, “Anticolonial Defeat: The 1967 Naksa and its Consequences,” Lateral, Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 12.2 (Fall 2023) https://csalateral.org/forum/towards-third-worlding/anti-colonial-defeat-1967-naksa-consequences-el-zein/.
Dahlia El Zein, “When Egypt & Syria United: The Rise & Fall of the UAR (1958-1961),” Fiker Institute, August 2023.
