According to the new scheme, FIME invites non-resident scholars to join its research community. When inviting researchers, in addition to academic merit, the applicant’s possible networks and scholar-at-risk-status are taken into account. The first non-resident scholar is Sana Tannoury-Karam.
Tannoury-Karam is currently working on her book that examines the political organization and activism of a group of Arab intellectuals – mostly Lebanese men and women – who advocated for social justice, international solidarity, democratic principles, and suffrage. The book is an intellectual and cultural history that recovers the ways Arab intellectuals engaged with the political sphere and negotiated their relevance in universal terms during the formative period of the emerging order of state and community in the Levant. Although the book chronicles the foundations of the Lebanese left, it is not an institutional history of the communist party. Rather, this book exemplifies the ideological fluidity that characterized the interwar period by focusing on individuals who, although adhered to a leftist worldview, represented the porousness of affinities by combining various causes and crossing certain political boundaries that would become more rigid with time.
The collective biography this book narrates includes individuals who fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939, some who participated in meetings of the Berlin-based international League Against Imperialism in 1927 and 1929, one who became the first Arab woman to run for parliament in 1953, and others who were imprisoned for aiding the revolutionaries of the Great Syrian Revolt between 1925 and 1927. These were Arabs ‘in tune’ with their times, and their timelines were both, local and universal. This project centers local actors within a global historical timeline from which they are often left out and identifies a universal timeline that these local actors also shaped.