Department of History

Ellis Garey is an intellectual and social historian of labor, communism, and anti-colonialism in the modern Middle East. She received her Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from New York University in 2024. While at NYU, she was a steward, bargaining committee member, and strike organizer for her graduate student worker union GSOC-UAW 2110 and a member of the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union caucus.

As the 2024-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow in Labor History at Brown, Ellis will focus on completing her manuscript in progress, “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, she looks forward to organizing departmental and public initiatives related to labor studies, particularly in the Global South. She is excited to be an incoming member of the Brown Postdoc Labor Organization.