“Occluded Circulations: Mapping the Smuggling Histories Straddling the Jordan River”
ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellowship, 2023–2024
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History
Alex Jreisat, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, specializes in questions around borders, circulation, law, and kinship in the 20th-century Levant, with a focus on Jordan and Palestine. Alongside his academic pursuits, Jreisat is a writer, educator, and translator, and translated Ghalib Halasa’s novel Sultana in 2019. His enthusiasm for digital humanities extends to 3-D modeling, printing, mapping, machine learning, and handwritten text recognition (HTR). In collaboration with Prof. Nora Barakat of Stanford University, he has created and managed the Ruqʿah Reader project, which aims to make Arabic handwriting machine readable.
