Tuesday, May 2
7:00pm EST
Olmsted Room, Mandelle Hall

This year’s guest speaker is Dr. Edward Curtis.

Edward Curtis is the William M. and Gail M. Plater Chair of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Religious Studies at the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University, Indianapolis. He is the author or editor of 14 books about Black, Muslim, and Arab American Studies, and the recipient of Mellon, Fulbright, NEH, and Carnegie fellowships and grants. Curtis grew up in Southern Illinois, where his Arab great-grandfather settled in 1899.

Please join the Department of Religion for Dr. Curtis’ talk,

“Muslims of the Heartland: How Ottoman Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest”

Most Michiganders are familiar with the large Arab Muslim population around Detroit, but what they don’t know is that some of the people who established these communities after World War I were first homesteaders in the Dakotas, railroad car workers in Indiana, and school children in Iowa. Edward Curtis, a descendant of those Syrian-Lebanese settlers, reveals the untold story of the racism and environmental challenges they faced, the mosques they built, and the Midwestern towns that they came to call home.