Presenter: Randa Tawil, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of American Studies, Yale University

This talk follows the long and circuitous journey of Zeinab Ameen, a young woman from Ottoman Syria, as she confronted the Ottoman, French, British, and U.S. empires and Mexican state on her way to meet her husband in Michigan City, Indiana at the turn of the 20th century. Thirty years after she arrived in the United States, she was tried for murder of her husband in a case that rose to national news. Through a migrant-centered analysis, Ameen’s trial and portrayal in the media is reread to show how she traveled, and the decisions she was forced to make along the way, affected how the public understood her thirty years after she arrived in the United States.