Department of History

Ellis Garey is an intellectual and social historian of labor, communism, and technology in the modern Middle East. Garey is currently completing her first book manuscript, Figuring Labor: The Emergence of the Worker in Greater Syria, 1870-1943. Working across Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and French sources, the project attends to the emergence of “the worker” as both a social concept and as a historical actor in late-Ottoman and French Mandate Greater Syria.

At Brown, Garey offers labor history courses on topics including “Laboring Against Automation” and “Work: A Global History.” Additionally, she has organized a two-day research workshop on “Labor and the Global South: Concepts, Theories, and Histories,” which brought 12 labor historians to Brown. She is also the organizer of an interdisciplinary “Labor Studies” works-in-progress group and is the convener of a reading group on “Automation.” Interested Brown participants are warmly invited to reach out.

In addition to her research interests in labor, Garey has been active as a rank-and-file and elected member of academic unions. At NYU, she was a steward, bargaining committee member, and strike organizer for her graduate student worker union GSOC-UAW 2110. At Brown, she has been involved in the Brown Postdoctoral Labor Organization’s ongoing campaign for a first contract.

Garey received her Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from New York University in 2024. Her work is featured and forthcoming in Radical History Review and The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.