Our Alumni

Arabic Alumni Panel

In Spring 2026, the department hosted an alumni panel with three former Arabic students of the College. Over thirty current students joined and engaged them on highly-relevant questions about how to use Arabic in a job market that is constantly evolving with artificial intelligence, changing geopolitical landscapes, and funding fluctuation. The panelists then continued the conversation with students at dinner that night and lunch the next day and offered workshops tailored to tangible skills for the career world such as CV writing, interview preparation, networking and cold calling, as well as specific, tailored advice to individual students.

Senior work by Arabic majors 

Spring 2026

• Zane Barnwell: Land of Baraka: Movement and the making of sacred authority in North Africa’s desert landscapes
• Abraham Barrow: Compelling Faith: Divine Miracles and Belief in Surah Maidah and the Modern World
• Cate Kreutzen: Losing the Thread: How Translation Contributes to the Appropriation and Commodification of Tatreez

Spring 2025

• Sade Awodesu: “Solidarity and Spilled Milk: How the Palestine Question Fractured the Progressive Politics of Philadelphia’s First Black Mayorship ” – joint major with History
• Sophie Butler-Rahman: “Writing as Resistance: An Analysis of Levantine Prison Literature and Theory.”
• Summer Eaton: “On the Distribution of Demonstrative Determiners in Moroccan Arabic”
• Jennifer Li: “Understanding the Effects of the SNTV Vote System on Youth Unemployment in Jordan”

Spring 2024

• Nicholas Dahlen: “Contemporary Arabic Poetry: Challenges in Translation”
• Hazel Traw: “Finding Yourself in the Arabian Desert”

Winter 2024

• Theo McDermott-Hughes: “Village Divided: Violence and Identity Along the Spanish-Moroccan Border” (joint with Anthropology)
• Madeleine Gallop (double major with Geography)

Spring 2023

• Willie Thacker: “An Ethnography of the Jordanian Dive Industry.”
• Katie Wilmore (joint major with Geography)

Spring 2022

• Sofia Leathers: “Conjuring Up Legitimacy: The Nabatean Agriculture in Translation”
• Max Shulman-Litwin: “An Analysis of the Judeo-Arabic Dialect of Baghdad”
• Leah Smith: “qT3: An App for the Algorithmic Deduction of Arabic Verbs” —  joint major with Computer Science
• Aidan Wertz: “Issues of Translation in Two Arabic Short Stories”
• Andrew Willis: “On Issues of Translation in the Poetry of Marwan Makhoul”

Spring 2021

• Hannah Abdelaal: “Sentiment Analysis of Egyptian Dialectical Arabic”—- joint major with Computer Science
• Kamli Faour: “Diaspora and Disparity: Arab American Health Care Conditions and Concerns”

Winter 2021

• Sam Naumann: “Tribalism in Jordan: An Investigation into Tribal Mediation”

Spring 2020

• Kenny Fernandez: “Apples to Za’atar: The Shouf Biosphere Reserve’s Role in Environmental Governance and Community-Based Development”
• Cara Levine: “Lucid Exile: Post-Memory and the Works of Mona Hatoum and Mette Loulou von Kohl”
• Ellise Johnson: “Metaphor, Perspective and Identity: A Look at the Poetry of Yamen Hussein in Translation”
• Shams Mohajerani: “Auteurship, Revolution, and the Palestinian Identity: An Analysis of Elia Suleiman’s ‘Palestine Trilogy’ through the Lens of Third Cinema

Winter 2019

• Rose Adams: “Memory of a Stranger: The Story of the Syrian Quarter and the Pen League Writers”

Fall 2017

• Lorenzo Greenbaum: “The Constituents of Language Identity in Rabat”

Spring 2017

• Katherine Preston: “Representation of Homeland in Contemporary Palestinian Literature”

Spring 2016

• Freshta Basij-Rasikh
• Will Brennan-Arffmann
• Aleck Silva-Pinto
• Parker Ziegler

Spring 2014

• Cailey Cron
• Katharine Meeker
• Linnea Meyer
• Alexandra Vallarta

Spring 2013

• Tyler Brelje

Spring 2012

• David Hamberlin
• Paul Rosenfeld
• Daniel Vikum

Winter 2012

• Galen Anderson

Co-Advised Senior Work

Senior work in International and Global Studies and Comparative Literature co-advised by Arabic faculty 

Spring 2021

• Matthew Hartry Martingnoni (IGS): “Quotidian at the Precipice: Surveillance Technologies, Carcerality and (In)visibilization in Latent Regulatory Gay-Tech Meccas”
• Jeremy Navarro (CMLT): “Theory of Invisibility in Latin and Arabic”

Spring 2020 

• Jack Carew (CMLT): “Biopolitics in the Age of Pandemic: Reading a Cultural Competency into Koolaids and Loco Afán
• Evan Mercer (CMLT): “Musical Memory: Nass el-Ghiwane and their Impact on Moroccan Culture and Identity”
• Mari Odoy: “A Woman in the Crossfire, A Novelist in Translation: the “memorization” and translation of Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek into English”
• Will O’Neal (CMLT): “What’s in a Home? Conceptions of Dwelling in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Robert Frost”

Winter 2017

• Oakley Haight (IGS): “Fictions of Human Rights: Power, Intervention, and Universality in Arab Novels”

Spring 2016

• Ellen Bevier (IGS): “Tweeting the Revolution: Social Media and the Syrian Conflict”