Amy Fallas is a Salvadoran-Costa Rican historian, writer, and editor. She is a scholar of the modern and transnational Middle East and her research focuses on histories of infrastructure and social welfare, religion and racialization, ethnic and religious minorities in the eastern Mediterranean, and transhemispheric mobilities between the Middle East and Latin America. She received her MA in History from Yale University and her PhD in History from University of California, Santa Barbara.
She is currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at UC Davis. Her book manuscript "Their Own Poor: Communal Identity, Charitable Societies, and the Making of Sectarianism in Modern Egypt” offers a new approach to the social history of sectarianism in Egypt through local and global nodes of philanthropy from the late 19th to mid 20th century. "Their Own Poor” examines how a network of over a hundred sect-based charitable societies mediated inter-religious tensions in modern Egypt through social service, medical infrastructure, scientific knowledge production, and urban interventions. Her second project turns to integral role of Palestinian migrants in the formation of El Salvador and the forging of ‘Latin East’ geographies in the twentieth century.
Amy is currently Associate Editor at the Arab Studies Journal and has held editorial roles for the Yale Journal for International Affairs and the Journal of Palestine Studies. Her academic scholarship is published in peer reviewed journals such as History Compass, NACLA Report on the Americas, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, and the Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her public-facing work has appeared in The Washington Post, Jadaliyya, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, Mada Masr, the New Arab, the Revealer, Sojourners, Contingent Magazine, and more.
She has lived in the Middle East since 2021 through the generous support of research fellowships with the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), the American Society for Church History (ASCH), the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University, and others. In a previous life, she worked for several public history institutions including history museums, archives and libraries, and historical societies in Connecticut.
She is based in Beirut, Lebanon.
Recent Publications
A Marginalized Memory in Egypt: Remembering the Maspero Massacre from the Coptic Hospital
with TIMEP
The Palestinian connection in El Salvador's politics
with the New Arab
Palace Intrigue
with Contingent
The Great History of Small Things
with Contingent Magazine
El Pueblo de Israel:
Latino Evangélicos and Christian Zionism with the Revealer