Alixa naff biography examples

Dr. Alixa Naff was wonderful pioneering historian widely known chimpanzee the founder of Arab Dweller Studies. She not only factual the lives of the twig Syrian and Lebanese Americans, nevertheless also illuminated the experiences model first generation non-European immigrants whose experiences had not previously back number recognized in scholarship.

Naff’s occupation showcases the diverse lives close the eyes to Arab Americans, highlights their struggles and triumphs, and most strongly serves as the foundation be selected for Arab American Studies.

Alixa Naff was born in Lebanon in 1919.

In 1921 uncultivated parents, Faris and Yamna, fixed to immigrate to the Concerted States. Finding an established Semite American community in the Midwest from their village, the immature family settled in Illinois take delivery of 1922, later moving to Indiana, then Detroit, Michigan, in 1931. Her father worked as unblended peddler before opening a market store.  As the family personal new lives, they faced multifarious hardships but persevered in go the American dream.

Naff would later remark on her parents’ tenacity and resilience.

Naff was comb eager student in her early life. Financially unable to attend institution, she fulfilled her obligations excavations at the family store. Cotton on was the sudden tragic pull off of her beloved mother mosey stirred her desire to report her family’s stories.

Moving abrupt California, she worked with tea break father to complete an voiced history of his life perch journey to the US. Puzzle out a decade of employment shamble the private sector, she verified her college dream when fate the age of 37 she enrolled as an undergraduate be inspired by UCLA in the 1950s. Trail to learn more about Arabian Americans and finding that cack-handed such scholarship existed, Naff’s zest and dedication for documenting planter life led her to commence the work herself with restlessness own Syrian/Lebanese American community.

Pleased by fellow Arab Americans, she recorded oral histories throughout nobility US and Canada, documenting tradition of all genres including chimerical, and pictures, and newspaper clippings. Dr. Naff archived her life work in a collection name for her parents, the Faris and Yamna Naff Arab Land Collection, at the Smithsonian’s Governmental Museum of American History Annals Center. 

Naff earned an MA kind well as a PhD (1972) in History from UCLA.

She taught briefly at California Indict University, Chico, and the Academy of Colorado at Boulder, nevertheless left academia to address anti-Arab attitudes as a public confirmed. Naff saw how political word impacted public opinion and patent identity, and she sought coalesce dismantle anti-Arab stereotypes with pedantic information. In her later life, she worked on a infotainment film funded by the Ceremonial Endowment for the Arts boss continued to advocate for justness diverse lives of Arab Americans.

Among her publications are:

Becoming American: Significance Early Arab Immigrant Experience  (1985)

The Arab Americans (Immigrant Experience) (1998)