In a recent course titled 20th and 21st Century Women Intellectuals, I read Helen Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) and learned she coined the term “ecriture feminine” or “women’s writings”. Cixous’s appeal to women to bolden themselves and use their own rhetoric inspired me to find the works and writings of Arab-American women. Although Cixous is not concerned with race or ethnicity in her essay, in essence her appeal calls for a rhetoric beyond that which we have been swayed to believe is the only rhetoric and conviction of thought and speech i.e. male and Eurocentric.  At the intersection of women and ethnic minority, Arab-American women scholars rise to the occasion of engaging in rhetorics that expand, complicate, and/or challenge the majoritarian rhetorics found in US academia. However, the works of Arab-American women academics is rarely, if at all, read in many US universities. I created  Arab American Women Academics, a curated digital index of Arab American Women Academics, to achieve the following goals: 1) catalog the names, affiliations, and works of Arab American women in the Humanities found in US academia, 2) provide a searchable OER for college instructors that will inspire them to add an Arab American women academic to their syllabus, and 3) engage in a larger conversation about  Arab American women’s contribution to  women’s rhetoric and in women and gender studies.

This is the first iteration of the project with 13 names and descriptions of Arab American women academics who have been awarded or been on the honorable mentions list of the Arab American National Museum Non-Fiction Book Award since 2006. The descriptions are the ones present on the Arab American National Museum Book Award site.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.