Sarah Gualtieri received the 2020 Alixa Naff Book Prize in Migration Studies for her book, “Arab Routes.”
(Photo courtesy of Sarah Gualtieri)
Catching up with her friend in a coffee shop in As-Suwayda, Syria during an early 1990s summer, then-graduate student Sarah Gualtieri overheard a language she was surprised to hear in the region: Spanish. Thinking that the Spanish speakers were tourists and voicing her thoughts to her friend, Gualtieri was corrected that the “tourists” were in fact Syrians visiting from Venezuela for the season.
Since then, Gualtieri’s interest in the study of Syrian migration, particularly in connection to Latin America, has only grown.