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The Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar

Dedicated to the teaching of history

The Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar, housed in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), is dedicated to the teaching of history. Studies of the past, including the recent past, are carried out within the departments and programs of FASS.

Current Farley Scholars

Rana Barakat
September 2026 to May 2027
International Studies

An associate professor of history at Birzeit University and the former director of the Birzeit University Museum in Palestine (2021-2025), her research interests include the history of colonialism, nationalism, museum and archive studies, and rebellion. She received her PhD in history from the University of Chicago.

Barakat’s book, (UNC Press, 2026), contributes an Indigenous reading of time, space, and memory in Palestine. She is currently working on two book projects. The first, titled “Unsettling the Museum,â€� explores the acquisition, management, care and display of collections. Focusing on the Tawfiq Canaan Amulet and Talisman Collection and the Huxley Collection, both early twentieth century ethnographic collections from Greater Syria, the book follows the collection’s journeys from their origins into “museumsâ€� to explore and dismantle the relationships between collectors, objects, preservation, and colonial extraction. The second project, titled "Rhythms of Rebellion: The Buraq Revolt in Palestine and its Many Afterlives," traces the concept and practice of rebellion, from the 1929 revolt to the present in Palestine. 

Nalini Mohabir
January 2027 to August 2027
Global Asia

Nalini Mohabir is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University. She is also the director of the at Concordia. Mohabir teaches in the fields of feminist and postcolonial geographies. She is a Caribbeanist, with a focus on Asian indentureship. Her work on indentureship is concerned with questions of diasporic return and its (im)possibilities; the implications of pivotal historical turning points for Afro-Indo Caribbean relations; and visual representation of indentureship and its legacies.

She has published articles in various journals and she has been working with long-time collaborator Ronald Cummings (McMaster University), on a series of publications about the Sir George Williams student protest  and an upcoming anthology on the visualities of the protest. Together with Cummings, she is the co-editor of Topia: A Canadian journal of Cultural Studies. She is also the Caribbean area editor for the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas and a member of the editorial board of Trans Asia Photography.

Applications are now closed

Please check back again for the next application cycle. 

Past Farley Scholars

Greg Robinson 
2025-26 Farley Scholar

A professor of American history at l'Université du Québec À Montréal, Robinson's expertise lies in transnational North American political and ethnic history, centering on Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians. Robinson is a prolific author on the Japanese North American experience in the World War II era. His latest book,  (University of Washington Press, 2024), co-written with Jonathan van Harmelen, is an anthology of news columns that delves into a range of themes from race and interracial relationships to sexuality, faith, and national identity.

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Cheryl Narumi Naruse
2024-25 Farley Scholar

An associate professor of English at Tulane University, Naruse's research and teaching interests include contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures (particularly those from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands), diasporic Asian and Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, cultures of capitalism, and genre studies. Through readings of contemporary literature and state-sponsored cultural productions from Singapore, Naruse’s first book, Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore, analyzes the dynamics of Global Asia—an alluring location ideal for economic flourishing—in the context of Singapore’s cultural history of "postcolonial capitalism". 

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Adrian De Leon
2023-24 Farley Scholar

An award-winning multidisciplinary writer and public historian, De Leon is a renowned expert in the history of U.S.-Philippine relations and Asian American politics as well as an advocate for the literary arts in his hometown of Scarborough, Ontario. Besides being an academic scholar, De Leon also wrote and hosted two shows with PBS Digital Studios—A People’s History of Asian America, a four-part miniseries which addresses the increase in hate crimes and anti-Asian sentiment in the United States; and Historian’s Take, which explores history through the lens of pop culture, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a Daytime Emmy.

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Ferenc Csirkés
2022-23 Farley Scholar

Dr. Ferenc Csirkés holds a PhD in Islamic history and civilization from the University of Chicago, and he is currently an assistant professor of history at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey. His research interests include Iranian history, Ottoman history, Ottoman Turkish literature, Persian literature, cultural history, Central Asian history, and Central Asian literature. As a Farley scholar, he is completing a book manuscript with the working title Sons of Japheth and Ali: Turkic Language and Ideology in the Medieval and Early Modern Persianate World, which focuses on the politics of language in Safavid Iran, discussing such topics as vernacularization, confessionalization, and state building.

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Linda Morra
2021-22 Farley Scholar

A full professor of English at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Dr. Linda Morra is an award-winning instructor and researcher who teaches in the areas of women’s archives, theories of affect, and women’s writing in Canada. Her research focuses on women's archives, women's writing in Canada and archival theories. Morra’s  includes the book, Unarrested Archives: Case-Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and numerous edited or co-edited books. This includes the 2021 collection co-edited with SFU’s Dr. Sarah Henzi:  (Wilfred Laurier Press, 2021) which earned the Canadian Studies Network . 

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Holly M. Karibo
2020-21 Farley Scholar 

Dr. Holly Karibo is currently an  of Comparative Borderlands History at Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on the history of vice, labor, and sexuality in transnational urban spaces from the late-19th century to the present. Her first book, UNC Press 2015), examines the history of illegal economies in the Great Lakes border region during the post-World War II period. Sin City North received the Michigan State History Book Award in 2016.

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Lynnell L. Thomas
2019-20 Farley Scholar

Dr. Lynnell Thomas' research interests include New Orleans tourism, African American history and culture, and Black popular culture. A native of New Orleans, Lynnell Thomas is part of the post-Katrina diaspora, which informs her teaching and scholarship.  Her research is also concerned with the diverse backgrounds and experiences that constitute and contest American identity and values.  Her most recent scholarship has examined the distortion of African American history and culture in New Orleans’ tourism narrative, the negative impact of this narrative on policy decisions following Hurricane Katrina, and the ways that African Americans and others have attempted to resist and revise this narrative. 

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Katrina Jagodinsky
2018-19 Farley Scholar 

Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky is a legal historian and the Susan J. Rosowski . She holds a PhD in History and MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on women’s creative and critical uses of the law in the long nineteenth century as they countered the expansion of empire, misogyny, and racial hierarchies in personal and political contexts throughout the North American West. In addition to many articles, she is author of the award-winning book, , and co-editor of Beyond the Borders of Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West.

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