Salamat! My name is Dr. Jennifer Mogannam and I am an Assistant Professor in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and an affiliate of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and my MA in Arab and Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut (AUB). Prior to the tenure-track, I was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis in the departments of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies and received the 2023 UC Davis Excellence in Postdoctoral Research Award. I have also served as a lecturer at the UC, Cal State, and Community College level.
I am a critical, cross-disciplinary scholar of oral history, ethnography, and cultural criticism. My work examines 20th and 21st century Palestinian and Arab transnational movements and third world solidarities, with an eye for analyzing movement praxis for liberated futures. My work intervenes in the critical study of refugees, borders, colonialism and imperialism, global scales of race and indigeneity, and resistance and is grounded in transnational, women of color, indigenous, and Palestinian methods and lenses of liberation.
My current book manuscript, with the working title Gendering Revolution: Palestinian-Lebanese Transnational Resistance and Decolonial Praxis, frames the stakes and limits of revolution for the stateless, the refugee, and the citizen as defined by active participant narrations of revolution in 1970s Lebanon. I specifically examine the moment and relationship between Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary trajectories that built coalition in Lebanon during what has been deemed the Lebanese Civil war. This work intervenes in the question of coalition building and internal power in movement praxis, gendered labor in anti-colonial struggle and redefining and resisting epistemic violence on the path of decolonization.
My publications have been placed in American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies, Social Identities and Amerasia, with more in the pipeline. You can check out my published works in the “writing” tab. I have an ongoing, collaborative Borders are Obsolete project, co-created with Dr. Leslie Quintanilla, that seeks to challenge border systems through illuminating grassroots work to circumvent them.
I offer oral history workshops to train community members and academics on how to enact the method and its importance for preserving collective experiential community narrative from below and honoring living archives. I am also equipped as a facilitator and program curriculum developer in community, organizational, and academic spaces. I stay actively engaged and grounded in local, national and transnational communities as an organizer in Palestinian and Arab American community spaces for nearly two decades, most recently with the Palestinian Feminist Collective.
My work, while often historical, is also always forward looking, toward the possibilities of decolonization and building a new world.
Advisors and Mentors: Postdoctoral: Suad Joseph | Doctoral - Daphne Taylor-Garcia, Dennis Childs, Yen Espiritu, Jodi Kim, Kalindi Vora | Masters - Mayssun Succarieh, Rosemary Sayigh, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Tarif Khalidi
For more about my work, check out my interview with UC Davis’ Feminist Research Institute where I was formerly a Visiting Scholar.