Campus Directory

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Title Assistant Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA)

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Web Site

Primary Office Location Humanities Building 1
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Mail Stop Humanities Academic Services

Biography, Education and Training

Dr. Jennifer Mogannam is an Assistant Professor in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and an affiliate of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and an MA in Arab and Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut (AUB). Prior to the tenure-track, she was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis in the departments of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies and received the 2023 UC Davis Excellence in Postdoctoral Research Award. She has also served as a lecturer at the UC, Cal State, and Community College level.

Jennifer is a critical, cross-disciplinary scholar of oral history, ethnography, and cultural criticism. Her work examines 20th and 21st century Palestinian and Arab transnational movements and third world solidarities, with an eye for analyzing movement praxis for liberated futures. This work intervenes in the critical study of refugees, borders, colonialism and imperialism, global scales of race and indigeneity, and resistance and is grounded in transnational, women of color, indigenous, and Palestinian methods and lenses of liberation.

Jennifer’s current book project frames the stakes and limits of revolution for the stateless, the refugee, and the citizen as defined by active participant narrations of revolution in 1970s Lebanon. Specifically, she examines the moment and relationship between Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary trajectories that built coalition in Lebanon during what has been deemed the Lebanese Civil war. This work intervenes in the question of coalition building and internal power in movement praxis, gendered labor in anti-colonial struggle and redefining and resisting epistemic violence on the path of decolonization. 

Her publications, which speak to borders, imperialism, Marxist thought, social movements, and refugees, have been placed in American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies, Social Identities and Amerasia, with more in the pipeline. She also has an ongoing, collaborative Borders are Obsolete project, co-created with Dr. Leslie Quintanilla, that seeks to challenge border systems through illuminating grassroots work to circumvent them.

Her work, while often historical, is also always forward looking, toward the possibilities of decolonization and building a new world.

Selected Publications

“Locating Palestinians at the Intersections: Indigeneity, Critical Refugee Studies, and Decolonization.” Amerasia 47, no. 2, (2021): 9-19.

“Borders are Obsolete Part II: Reflections on Central American Caravans and Mediterranean Crossings.” Critical Ethnic Studies 6, no. 2 (2021).

"Syria’s anti-imperialist mask: unveiling contradictions of the left through anti-capitalist thought." Social Identities 24, no. 2 (2018): 222-237.

"Borders Are Obsolete: Relations beyond the" Borderlands" of Palestine and US–Mexico." American Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2015): 1039-1046.