I am a writer, editor, and PhD Candidate in History working across the fields of modern Middle East and late Ottoman History, Religious Studies, Archival Studies, and the Latin East (Middle East-Latin American studies). My research examines religious difference, communal institutions, the development of sectarianism, and historical memory in modern Egypt as well as transnationally between El Salvador and Palestine during the 20th Century.
Provisionally titled “Their Own Poor: Communal Identity, Charitable Societies, and the Making of Sectarianism in Modern Egypt 1879-1939” my dissertation examines the formation, development, and popularity of charitable societies in Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I consider the meteoric rise and proliferation of charitable associations during this period as both a form of cross-confessional solidarity as well as communal boundary-making at a time when the meaning of sectarianism in Egypt was debated and forged. I argue that charitable societies were central to how religious communities articulated the boundaries of their identity and how they related to ‘others’ within the Egyptian national project during the nationalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
My research and language studies have been generously supported by the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, the Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), the Yale Center for Race, Indigenous, and Transnational Migration, the American Society for Church History (ASCH), the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Borchard European Studies Foundation, the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, and the UCSB Center for Middle East Studies.
In addition to my academic scholarship, I also write reportage, commentary, and creative nonfiction which further explores questions related to my research through personal and investigative essays on race, religion, and politics in and between Egypt, El Salvador, and the United States. This work is published in The Washington Post, Jadaliyya, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, HAZINE, the Revealer, Sojourners, Contingent Magazine, Rusted Radishes and more. For more information about my research and work, an interview: https://egyptmigrations.com/2020/03/29/interview-with-amy-fallas-philanthropic-solidarities/
“Their Own Poor: Communal Identity, Charitable Societies, and the Making of Sectarianism in Modern Egypt 1879-1939”
ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
2025 “The First Duty of Charity:” Medical Philanthropy, Sectarian Infrastructures,
and Legacies of the Coptic Hospital in Twentieth Century Cairo,” Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 45(1), May 2025.
2024 “Hermanos fi al-Muqawama, Brothers in the Resistance,” The North
American Congress on Latin America 56(4), Winter 2024: 428-434.
“Death of a Prime Minister: The Assassination of Boutros Ghali and Mediating
Sectarianism in Egypt, 1906-1911,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations
35 (2): 117–35.
“Sectarian Politics? Securitization, Urban Development, and Coptic Advocacy
in Cairo,” in Cairo Securitized: Reconceiving Urban Justice and Social
Resilience, edited by Paul Amar, 401-411, Cairo: AUC Press, 2024.
2023 “Sectarianism and Charity in Modern Egypt: The Coptic Case.” 42 Revue
Diasporas, Circulations, Migrations, Histoire (2023).
“Charity and Philanthropy in Middle East History,” History Compass, 21(3-4),
e12760.
2022 “H-Diplo Article Review of Karine Walther, ‘Dorothy Thompson and American
Zionism,’ Diplomatic History 46:2 (April 2022) 263-291.
2016 “From the Cedars to the Frontlines: Danbury’s Greater Syrian Immigrants and the
Great War,”Connecticut History Review Journal, 55, no. 2 (Fall 2016), 140-152.
SELECT EDITORIALS AND PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
2024 “The Palestinian Connection in El Salvador’s Politics,” The New Arab
2023 “The Power of El Salvador’s Palestinian Diaspora,” Institute of Palestine Studies
“Palace Intrigue,” Contingent Magazine
“Rebelling Against Time in Cairo,” Mada Masr
2022 “When Unity Discourse Dismisses Systemic Sectarianism in Egypt,” Tahrir
Institute for Middle East Policy
“The Faith-Based Politics of El Salvador’s Millennial President,”
Religion and Politics
“The Forbidden Photographs,” Rusted Radishes Beirut Literary Magazine
“Beyond Sectarian Violence: Socioeconomic Challenges for Copts in Egypt,”
Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy
2021 “The Great History of Small Things,” Contingent Magazine
“El Pueblo de Dios: Latino Evangelicals and Christian Zionism,” The Revealer
“How I Met My Mother (and Billy Graham),” The Revealer
2020 “Some Textbooks Still Parrot Donald Trump’s Skewed Version of U.S. History,”
Washington Post
“American Protestantism’s Commodification of the Middle East’s ‘Holy Lands,’”
Sojourners
“In the Garden of Eden with Shakira,” Sojourners
2019 “Ramy Kamel, Mada Masr, and Seeing Coptic Issues as Civil Liberties in Egypt,”
Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy
“What the Taming of Christian Spaces Reveals about Egypt’s Security
Complex,” Jadaliyya
“El Salvador’s Bukele at Crossroads in Relations with Ancestral Land,”
Palestine Square
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Instructor of Record, History, Santa Barbara City College
– HIST138 (History of the Modern Middle East), Spring 2024 & Spring 2025
Teaching Assistant, History, UC Santa Barbara (2019-2024)
– HIST 2C (World History), Spring 2024
– HIST46MI (Modern Iran and Global Politics), Winter 2024
– HIST 2A (World History), Summer 2023
– HIST 46A (The Middle East from Muhammad to the 19th Century), Spring 2021
– HIST 46B (Modern Middle East History), Fall 2020
– HIST 4C (Modern Europe), Spring 2020
– HIST 46A (The Middle East from Muhammad to the 19th Century), Winter 2020
– HIST 56 (Intro to Mexican History), Fall 2019
Instructor of Record, Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (2022)
– Archives of Memory and Forgetting in the Middle East, Winter 2022
Instructor of Record, Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara (2021)
– MES 45 (Intro to Middle East Studies), Summer 2021
Reader, History, UC Santa Barbara (2019-2021)
– HIST166 C (US History during the “Sixties,”) Winter 2021
– HIST 168N (Interracial Intimacies, Reader, UCSB, Winter 2020
– HIST167 D (US History since Watergate), Winter 2019
- Interdisciplinary Humanities Council Graduate Dissertation Fellowship 2023-24
- Fordham University, Orthodox Christian Studies Center’s Coptic Fellowship 2022-23
- Bemis Dissertation Research Grant, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) 2021-22
- American Society of Church History (ASCH) Research Fellowship for 2021-22
- Steve and Barbara Mendell Graduate Fellowship in Cultural Literacy 2021-22
- American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) Dissertation Research Fellowship 2021-22
- Orfalea Center Graduate Fellow, 2020-22
- Borchard European Studies Fellowship, 2020-21
- History Associates Fellowship, Spring 2020
- Center for Middle East Studies, Research Grant, Summer 2019
- Steven Hay Scholarship Award, Spring 2019
- History Associates Fellowship, Spring 2019
- Yale Center for Race, Indigenous, and Transnational Migration Research Fellowship, Cairo, Summer 2017
- Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowship Finalist (FLAS) in Arabic at Yale University, Summer 2017
- Critical Languages Scholarship (CLS) in Arabic at Yale University in Oman, Summer 2017
- Oral History Fellowship,Yale University, Fall 2016
- Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), Arabic Language Institute in Fez, Morocco, Summer 2016