My name is Natalie El-Eid and I am a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Syracuse University. For the 2022-23 academic year, I have the honor of being a Humanities Center Dissertation Fellow. As such, this talk gives an overview of my current dissertation project, “Transnational Druze and Reincarnation: Remembering, Recording, and Reconnecting.”

My dissertation project works at the intersections of Transnational, Trauma, Memory, Critical Race and Critical Ethnic studies with a focus on the heavily understudied ethnoreligious transnational Druze community, particularly, their unique core belief in reincarnation. Looking at Druze novels, documentaries, online cultures, and oral interviews that I have conducted with Druze peoples in the U.S. and Lebanon, my dissertation elucidates the ways in which an examination of the transnational Druze and Druze reincarnation calls for an expansion as well as reconfiguration of central debates and theorizations within these fields. This interdisciplinary humanities project thus interweaves critical race and ethnic studies, literary studies, ethnography, and psychology in order to illuminate how centering research on transnational Druze communities is not simply additive—but transformative. What does it mean to inherit trauma and memory, not only from family or culture, but from a past life? How do Druze people reconcile with the transnational in-betweenness of feeling connected to/remembering a homeland from a past life that they may never have even visited during their present one? What interventions can/do Druze experiences and stories make in individual, national, and global contexts? In exploring these questions, I aim to accomplish a broader understanding of the multiplicity of Arab and transnational Arab identities and cultures, as well as highlight the profound theoretical significance of the Druze and Druze reincarnation, pushing scholarship on the transnational Arab world in new directions.