about

Sara Awartani is an LSA Collegiate Fellow and an incoming Assistant Professor (2024) in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before joining Michigan, she was a Global American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and a Lecturer on Harvard’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights.

An interdisciplinary U.S. social movement historian, her research, publications, and teaching interrogate twentieth-century Latinx and Arab American radicalism, interracial solidarities, policing, and histories of the United States and the world. Her book manuscript, Solidarities of Liberation, Visions of Empire: Puerto Rico, Palestine, and American Global Power (under contract with UNC Press) chronicles a globally expansive story of Palestine liberation, Puerto Rican radicalism, and the United States’ efforts to weaponize and police those freedom dreams.

Her articles have appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and public-facing forums, including Radical History Review, Kalfou: A Comparative Ethnic Studies Journal, Society & Space, and Middle East Report, with a chapter in Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader (2021), edited by Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa. Her research has also received support across subfields, including the Puerto Rican Studies Association and the Arab American National Museum, with additional recognition by the Ford Foundation and the Latin American Studies Association. She was also an inaugural member of MERIP, NACLA, and Jadaliyya’s “Latin East” project: a cross-regional and cross-platform collaboration committed to exploring the new and longstanding ties between Latin America, the Middle East, and their respective diasporas in the United States.

Awartani received her Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University in 2020, and she is the recipient of the 2022 Virginia Sánchez Korrol Dissertation Award from the Puerto Rican Studies Association. She is a proud alumna of the University of Florida, where she graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in History (Go Gators).