Acknowledgements
Collecting the stories of the Arab American Community in Central Ohio-Columbus has been more rewarding than I could have ever imagined. None of this would have been possible without the generosity and openness of the Arab American community whose participation gave life to this project. I’m eternally grateful to those families who opened their homes and hearts to share their past histories, present experiences and future aspirations with me and my team of students from Denison University In particular, my thanks go to Mrs. Amal Ajarmeh, Mrs. Lubna Atif, Dr. Souzan El-Kest, Mr. Mohamed Jallaq and his wife Dr. Gehan Emara-Jallaq, Mr. Munjid and his wife Mrs. Wafa Hinnawi, and Mrs. Rana Odeh.
I also want to extend my appreciation and gratitude to The Ohio Five Mellon Digital Collection Granting Committee for its generous funding of this project. In particular, I thank Ben Daigle (Director of Consortial Library Systems, the Five Colleges of Ohio), Debra Andreadis (Deputy Director of Denison University Libraries), and Donnie Sendelbach (Director of Denison University Educational Technology Services). I am also grateful to Denison University for providing other forms of faculty and student funding, mainly The Denison University Research Foundation (DURF), Modern Languages Patty Foresman Fund, The Lisska Center for Scholarly Engagement and Alford Community Leadership & Involvement Center.
My special thanks go to the contributors and partners in this project, a team of dedicated and hard-working Denison students who became generators of knowledge through their great interviewing techniques, their thoughtful and deep questions and their time commitments that made this project successful. In particular: Victoria Alrabaa, Hannah Bennett, Fatimah Elghazawi, Mohamed El-Sayed, Jimmy Fennessey, Alexis (Lex) Grimm, Josh Lahoud, Olivia Reynolds and Tanner (Adam) Venrick. Furthermore, I want to acknowledge and thank my colleague and Instructional Technologist at the Department of Modern Languages Cheryl Johnson for her tremendous efforts, dedication and continued support of this project.
Finally, special thanks go to my family: my husband for being a source of inspiration and support and my children whose patience and understanding allowed mom to dedicate time to this project.