TIE Talks with Edward E. Curtis IV

Prof. Curtis discusses his personal connections to his research on the Arab and Muslim histories of the Midwest and the value of collaborating with community members to inform public-facing research.

Posted on April 1, 2025 in Interviews

This TIE Talks interview features Edward E. Curtis IV, who is the William M. and Gail M. Plater Chair of the Liberal Arts, Professor of World Languages and Cultures, and Director of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Indiana University in Indianapolis. In this interview, he discusses his most recent books, Arab Indianapolis and Muslims of the Heartland, the research for which was inspired by his own family’s deep-rooted Arab American heritage in the Midwest. From there, he delves into the experience of researching in local archives to recreate a portrait of the Midwest few may be familiar with and the growth of Arab Indianapolis from a community history blog into a book, a heritage trail, online learning modules, and even an Emmy Award–winning documentary on PBS. Along the way, the conversation touches on how scholars can work with community members to inform research that is widely accessible through public-facing media, as well as the importance of uncovering seemingly hidden histories to educate the public on America’s diverse and layered histories. This poignant conversation couldn’t be timelier, coming at the start of Arab American Heritage Month and at such a tumultuous and divisive moment in the nation’s political history.

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Much of your research is focused on uncovering Arab and Muslim histories and lives in America, including your recent books Arab Indianapolis (2022) and Muslims of the Heartland (2022), both of which reveal how these communities have made indelible contributions to the Midwest, a region often thought of as being ethnically homogenous. What inspired you to pursue this line of research over your career? From where does your interest in Arab and Muslim history, particularly of the Midwest, stem?

The one-word answer is my grandmother, who was born to Ottoman Syrian-Lebanese immigrants in Southern Illinois. In my hometown, where my brown skin frequently elicited the question, “What are you?,” Cassie Samaha Moses Saffa Caffery, my maternal grandmother, taught me to be a proud Arab. But she also told me that I was a Saluki—that is, a person from Southern Illinois, also known as Little Egypt. For my granny, there was no contradiction between our deep love of the Midwest and our long history as Arab people. She also did not cotton to religious sectarianism. Though all the relatives I knew growing up were Arab American Christians, she hinted at a family secret that I got close to confirming in the course of my research: it seems that one branch of the family—her mother’s—was Muslim. She was the chief theorist of my recent work, which seeks to uncover the ways you can belong to all these histories.

Both books recount the personal stories of many everyday individuals, recreating the communities in which they lived with vivid detail. What was your research process like in recovering these stories, and what led you to investigate the specific figures you did? Were there any surprising insights you discovered in researching either book that readers might be interested to learn?

First came Muslims of the Heartland. I set out to write a book about the stories of about a dozen Muslim families from what was then Greater Syria and is now mainly Lebanon who settled in the U.S. Midwest before World War I—from Indiana and Iowa to the Dakotas. I focused on the kids who either moved here at a young age or were born in the Midwest shortly after their parents arrived.

Instead of utilizing evidence from these people’s lives to prove an overarching thesis, my main goal was to foreground biographies of these people and the places in which they lived. The book does make some historical arguments (so, it has subtle theses), but I wanted this research to work as much on the affective and sensory levels as the analytical. I wanted readers to feel, touch, hear, see, and smell what it was like to live in these times and places. To do that, I needed to use a variety of sources that established where the protagonists lived, what that place looked like, and how they felt about their experiences. I chose to include people in the book not because they were famous, but because they left behind the sources I needed to describe their lives in unprecedented detail. These sources included oral history interviews and diaries in the Naff Collection at the Smithsonian and in state, university, and local libraries across the Midwest as well as Sanborn insurance maps, city directories, newspapers, census data, immigration papers, military records, and so on. Even if readers are familiar with the rural and small-town Midwest, unless they actually grew up in pre-World War II Cedar Rapids, Michigan City, or Sioux Falls, I think they will be surprised by the presence and vitality of these self-identifying Muslims who established some of the first mosques in the region while also participating in the shared culture and society of the Midwest—from laboring on the assembly line and on farms to enjoying the jazz music of the 1920s.

Arab Indianapolis is a particularly interesting project, having expanded from a community history blog to also encompass a book, an Emmy Award–winning documentary (available through PBS), an educator workshop, a collection of online learning media, community dialogues, and even a heritage trail. Can you briefly discuss how the project grew? How did your collaboration with PBS come about?

Using the new research skills that I had learned while writing Muslims of the Heartland, I decided to turn my attention to the first Arabic-speaking immigrants in my own city, Indianapolis. I was completely surprised by what I discovered. I had lived here for almost two decades, but somehow, I never knew about the vibrant, mainly Christian community of Syrian-Lebanese people who had established an Arabic-speaking neighborhood here in 1890s. And the memory of that place had been forgotten by the community itself. The kicker was the location of that community: it was on the same piece of land where Lucas Oil Stadium, the home of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, sits today.

Rather than writing traditional research, I came to embrace “Arab Indianapolis” as a multi-modal public history project in which the authority to determine its shape and content was shared among Arab American community members. All told, I worked with an advisory group of 24 community members and welcomed the donations of 75 individuals. I did not set out to make a movie or write a book—my collaborators asked me to do so. So the success and broad reach of the project were products of realizing the dreams of many community members, not one researcher. Because so many people had committed so much time, talent, and resources to the project, we used the products in as many different ways that we could to shape public consciousness of our long history in Indiana. The reason why we were able to gain the support of Indianapolis PBS affiliate WFYI for the documentary was because the documentary’s Director of Photography, the cinematographer, had made award-winning films that WFYI had produced and aired. This was the first major documentary for which I was lead writer and presenter, so I worked with several professional filmmakers to make it. WFYI worked with national PBS to make sure it could be streamed for free from all PBS station websites.

You engage frequently in public scholarship, consulting for and participating in other documentary films, writing for popular outlets like the New York Times, instructing K-12 teachers, and collaborating with community foundations. Moreover, many of your books have been described as highly readable, whereas other academic titles are often considered inaccessible to general readers. How important do you feel it is to make your research accessible to the public?

Like most academics, I did not set out in graduate school to become a public scholar. I received my doctorate in 2000, and then a year later, the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11 occurred. As a scholar of Islam, I was frequently called upon to do public, community-focused events. I was horrified by all the violence of this decade—not just the attacks of 9/11, but also the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and anti-Muslim, anti-Arab hate crimes and discrimination in the United States. My hope was to do what I could with knowledge and understanding to confront the Islamophobia and other forms of racism that were stoked by my own government’s war on terror.

At first, I wrote for the public in various op-eds, an encyclopedia, a general intro to Muslim American history, and so on. But as I collaborated with more and more community members and I learned how my colleagues in museum studies, public history, and applied anthropology worked, I began to work with the public and especially Muslim and Arab communities in Indianapolis. It was this approach to public-facing work, undergirded by the idea of shared authority, that informed my leadership of the Arab Indianapolis project. Instead of setting the agenda along the lines suggested by other scholars, I wanted to adopt the questions that community members outside the academy were generating. To be able to collaborate in the making of knowledge with people outside the academy, especially with other Arab Americans, became deeply meaningful and fulfilling—it was a source of strength and solidarity in troubling times for Arabs and Muslims.

In that vein, how might other academics, particularly those early in their careers, similarly strive to make their research more legible to non-academic audiences?

Community-engaged research is easier in some fields than others—in public health or public history, it’s essential, for example. But at some universities, it can be exceedingly difficult to obtain grants, get published, and earn tenure unless one’s scholarship is mainly responding to the concerns, the frameworks, and the questions of other scholars. Publicly focused research often counts as service, not research, in too many universities. In addition, many scholars report that they have not been trained to write for general audiences—and they don’t have the time to learn. Despite the presence of various initiatives, including some funding, to support publicly focused work across higher education, some scholars are also not interested in working with or writing for non-academic audiences.

Rather than thinking of public scholarship as a skill that one learns, I tend to think of it in communal and structural terms—where is it supported and rewarded? Who is willing to fund it? To whom do you hold yourself accountable? For those who are interested in such work, the easiest way to sustain a career in which you are focused as much if not more on non-academic audiences is to go where you are wanted, that is, where this public work is valued. I understand that one is lucky to get a job—any job—but if one is committed to community-engaged work, it would easier to find a place where such research is rewarded, not punished, and where you are not the only scholar doing public work. Identifying a community of publicly engaged scholars is essential, whether it is at one’s place of employment, among community members outside the academy, and/or in publicly focused scholarly networks, caucuses, and organizations.

Given how polarized American society is presently, and has been previously, over issues like immigration, your books serve as a corrective to stereotypical perceptions of Arabs and Muslims as foreign and threatening. How might your work encourage readers to apply a critical lens to this and other politically polarizing issues and adopt a more nuanced view? Is that a motivating factor in your research and teaching?

As producers and consumers of knowledge, we may be tempted to follow the latest sensation, the latest headline or click-bait—professors are often advised, for example, to write an op-ed about the latest controversy in order to bring attention to one’s expertise and its relevance to contemporary events. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I have done the same. But what my work on the Arab Indianapolis project taught me is that it’s important at times to put aside the so-called sexy questions. So often, scholars of Arab and Muslim studies, as well as scholars of other minoritized people, are asked to “explain” minority behavior to the majority. To riff on Toni Morrison, satisfying that consumer demand, ultimately grounded in racialist thinking, can be a distraction.

Slowing down to study, read, write, and create knowledge together can instead nurture communal ties of understanding and solidarity that go beyond the information we consume in our digital lives. Public libraries and neighborhood book clubs can become physical spaces where readers create community by encountering not just ideas, but one another, too. It’s the job of the writer to produce the books that can be used in imagining and creating these shared worlds of meaning that replace stereotyped and racist socialities.

More about Professor Edward E. Curtis IV

Dr. Edward E. Curtis IV is the William M. and Gail M. Plater Chair of the Liberal Arts, Professor of World Languages and Cultures, and Director of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Indiana University in Indianapolis.

This interview was conducted by Fatima Mohie-Eldin. She is one of the social science editors at Choice.

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