Randa Tawil is an Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University. She received her doctorate in the Department of American Studies at Yale University, and she specializes in migration and mobility, ethnic studies, and Arab/Middle Eastern American studies. She is interested in how race and gender are made meaningful for migrants during transit, and how sites outside of the United States contribute to racial and gender formations within the country.

My book, Race in Transit: Tracing the Politics of Migration from Ottoman Syria through US Empire is out June 9th with Stanford University Press!

At the turn of the twentieth century, life in Ottoman Syria was upended by European and US colonial and capital expansion. Many people responded by migrating to the United States. In doing so, they stepped into the world of international migration, where they had to navigate overlapping states and migration infrastructures—shipping companies and ticketing agents, health inspectors and border police, universities and kinship networks—that each facilitated, restricted, and policed movement.

With this book, Randa Tawil follows the itineraries of the early Syrian diaspora, stitching together migrants’ travels across archives from Beirut, Marseille, Liverpool, Manila, Washington, D.C., Michigan, and Texas. She reveals the overlapping and contradicting ways in which race was forged globally in the early twentieth century and its effects on Syrians in the United States. Syrian migrants encountered multiple imperial and national legal regimes during transit, and their varying relationships with different empires set the conditions under which migrants were considered “desirable” or “undesirable” once they reached US borders. Focusing on the experiences of those on the move, Race in Transit makes migrants the agents of a world history that has too often relegated them to the sidelines.

  • Vieux Porte (the old port), Marseille
  • view from the corniche, beirut
  • ruins of an old silk factory on Mt. Lebanon
  • Gate to the “Liverpool Sailor’s Home” founded in 1852 to help sailors on their sojourn in the city
  • abandoned quarantine “pavilon hoche,” Île de Frioul, Marseille
  • abandoned quarantines on the Île de Frioul, Marseille
  • militarized border wall Nogales, AZ

AWARDS and FELLOWSHIPS

2024-2025 University of Washington Simpson Center Scholar in Residence

2024-2025 American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship

2022-2023 American Association of University Women Fellowship

2022-2023 Cokie Roberts Research Fund in Women’s History, National Archives Washington DC

2020 Wise Woman Teaching Award for Feminist Pedagogy, Texas Christian University

2019-2020 American Counsel of Learned Scholars Dissertation Completion Fellowship