Charlotte Karem Albrecht

Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies and Director of the Arab and Muslim American Studies program at the University of Michigan, contributing to the Arts and Culture faculty. She earned her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2013. Albrecht's research specializations include Arab American history, histories of gender and sexuality, women of color feminist theory, queer of color critique, and interdisciplinary historicist methods. Her work explores how Arab American experiences have been shaped in relation to other minoritized communities, focusing on issues of power, subjectivity, race, gender, and sexuality.

In her first book, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling (University of California Press, 2023, open access ebook), Albrecht investigates the role of Syrian migrant peddlers in early Arab American communities, arguing that their economic practices and gender transgressions positioned them as racial and sexual others, challenging claims to whiteness. Her scholarship appears in Arab Studies Quarterly, Gender & History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and edited volumes. Currently, she is advancing "Peddling an Arab American History: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Early Syrian American Communities," which posits gender, class, and sexuality at the core of Arab American racialization, drawing on archives of popular culture, social welfare, and community records using women of color feminist theory, postcolonial history, queer theory, and cultural studies. A second project examines Arab American history alongside U.S. settler colonialism. Albrecht teaches courses like Arab American Studies and the Social Sciences, Topics in Ethnic Studies, and Special Topics in Gender, Race, and Ethnicity. She affiliates with the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the Program in Law, Race, and History. Her book earned an Honorable Mention in the 2024 Arab American Book Awards, and she serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

Professional Email: charka@umich.edu