John Tofik Karam contributes to the transnational turn in area and ethnic studies by reframing South America and the Middle East through their mutually entangled histories. His first book, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil, won awards from the Arab American National Museum and the Brazilian Studies Association. It was translated by the Editora Martins Fontes into Portuguese and by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies into Arabic. With María del Mar Logroño Narbona and Paulo G. Pinto, Karam coedited the volume, Crescent over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino U.S.A.. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, his current book project is titled, “Manifold Destiny: Arabs in an Exceptional Borderland of the Americas.” With Akram Khater and Andrew Arsan, he co-founded and co-edited the peer-reviewed Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, http://go.ncsu.edu/mashriq. Published in the journal's inaugural issue, his article, “The Lebanese Diaspora at the Tri-Border and the Redrawing of South American Geopolitics, 1950-1992,” was awarded the best article prize by the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association. In 2017, he was named Associate Director of the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies and Conrad Humanities Scholar.