Professor, Director, Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies

John Tofik Karam, PhD

John Tofik Karam puts Latin American and Middle Eastern connections at the center of understanding global cultural and political economies. 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. He 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 most recent book is Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule. He is Director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is also Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.Born and raised in upstate New York, John heard stories his grandmother told him of her birthplace, a town she called “trinta e três,” literally thirty-three. The name derived from the town’s location at the thirty-third kilometer of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad between Porto Velho and Guajará-Mirim, near Brazil’s border with Bolívia. Born to migrant Lebanese parents, his grandmother recalled the mango tree in the backyard of her family’s home and a milking cow provisioned by a “coronel” who her parents had chosen as her godfather. With less than ten years of age, she was sent to Lebanon to be raised. Upon her arrival in the port of Beirut, she recalled the almost suffocating embrace of an old woman, probably her own grandmother, who spoke a language she did not understand. She later married in Lebanon and moved with her husband to upstate New York, where she gave birth to three children, and later helped to raise six grandchildren, of which John is one. He began traveling to Brazil as a teenager, and followed an academic track because it brought him there, again and again.