ArabAmCC director received national award
Zeina Zaatari, PhD, director of the UIC Arab American Cultural Center (ArabAmCC) has been named as the recipient of the prestigious 2024 Middle East Section (MES) Distinguished Service Award within the American Anthropological Association (AAA).
The AAA award announcement is as follows:
We award the 2024 Distinguished Service prize to Zeina Zaatari, director of the Arab American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for her extraordinarily generous and visionary service to the field of Middle East Anthropology: her institution-building at a time of emergency, her teaching and training of scholars over many years including through workshop organizing and public events programming, her caring mentoring of students at UIC and beyond and her brave and pathbreaking scholarship on multifaceted women’s activism in Southern Lebanon.
She is a founding and leading member of the Arab Families Working Group. She is President-Elect of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS). Perhaps most importantly in this moment, she has built the ArabAmCC into an exemplary campus cultural center in the United States. Not only does it serve the needs of Arab and Muslim American students, but it also educates faculty, staff, students and other local groups about the Middle East and its diasporas—a massive contribution. It serves as a model for this urgent work for universities across the country.
At a critical time for Arab American and Muslim students, Dr. Zaatari has been a life-changing mentor whose work addresses and embraces the tremendous diversity within our Arab and Muslim American communities. She is an “utterly committed” teacher, as one letter-writer remarked. In the last year, she has served as a kind of “first responder similar to COVID-19 medical first responders.”
As another letter-writer said, “Zeina has worked non-stop to support our students and community, and to create a safe, welcoming and comfortable place for Arabs, Muslims and others to talk, process and grieve.”
We are proud to recognize Dr. Zaatari’s incredible work.