Natalie El-Eid

Dr. Natalie El-Eid is the American Druze Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is an elected Member-at-Large on the Executive Board of the Arab American Studies Association, co-chair of the Activism Caucus of the American Studies Association, and a working member of the Human Rights Committee of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies.

Bio and Featured Works

Her research and expertise focus on transnational Levantine Druze communities (namely Lebanon, Syria, Palestine) at the nexus of their ethnoreligious beliefs and contemporary lived experiences. In her current book project, Druze Afterlives: Between Bodies and Borders, Dr. El-Eid examines Druze reincarnation narratives in relation to what she frames as the “ongoing Lebanese Civil War.” In doing so, Dr. El-Eid introduces the concept of "Druze afterlives" to provide a new way of understanding how empire, war, trauma, memory, and gender intersect within and across the borders, bodies, and stories of the transnational Arab world. For this research, she was named the 2025-2026 Marwan M. and Ute Kraidy Centennial Postdoctoral Fellow in the Study of the Arab World by the American Council of Learned Societies. For outstanding academic research and community engagement with transnational Druze communities, Dr. El-Eid was also recognized by the Arab America Foundation as one of the “40 Under 40” accomplished Arab Americans 2025 cohort.