This panel discussion, moderated by Dr. Sa’ed Atshan, 2024–2025 Randolph Fellow in Peace, Conflict, and the Middle East, will feature Professors Tagreed Al-Haddad and Candace Lukasik. They will draw upon their knowledge of Christian communities in Egypt and Jordan to reflect on questions of indigeneity and diaspora in the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States.

Campus community only, please.

Sa’ed Atshan is the 2024-25 Randolph Fellow in Peace, Conflict and the Middle East at Vassar College and Chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Swarthmore College. He is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020), coauthor of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020), and co-editor of Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema (Bloosmbury, 2022). He is currently completing a book on Paradoxes of Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories (Stanford).

Tagreed Al-haddad is Lecturer of Arabic in the Africana Studies Program at Vassar College. She grew up in Amman Jordan and graduated from the University of Jordan with a BA in Public Administration and minor in Teaching and Education. She spent twelve years working as a principal in one of the Latin Patriarchate Schools. She earned a High Diploma in Education from Al-Balqa Applied University in Jordan. She is co-author of the college-level Arabic Language textbook Alyaseer. 

Candace Lukasik is Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. She is currently a Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Her research explores the transnational politics of migration, violence, and indigeneity in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Iraq, and its U.S. diasporas, with special attention to war ecologies, borders, and sovereignty. She is author of Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (forthcoming NYU Press, 2025).

Sponsored by the Dean of the Faculty Office.