Searching for Najla: 

Moving from private history to public narrative

Lecture and Fiction Reading

Date: Friday, November 5, 2010

Time: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.

Location: 2039 CB (Sandy Conference Room)

University of Michigan

4901 Evergreen Road

Dearborn, MI 48128

Lunch will be provided.  RSVP to Sharie Beard at sbeard@umd.umich.edu.

In the early 1980s, Princeton historian Alixa Naff interviewed Christina LaRose’s great-grandmother, Najla Nouhan, for Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience.  Naff’s scholarly work focused on the pre-World War I pio­neering generation of Arabic-speaking immigrants and their assimilation to the United States.  In this talk, Christina will discuss the process of transforming her great-grandmother’s oral history into a novel.  She will focus on historical and archival research, feminist and postcolonial historical fiction, narrative theory, and the fiction writing process.