As a Druze Lebanese American child of immigrants who has lived and studied in both the U.S. and Lebanon, Natalie El-Eid (she/her) calls attention to transnational Druze communities, often located at the margins of studies on the Arab world. In 2025 she was named one of the Arab America Foundation’s “40 Under 40.” As a scholar of contemporary transnational literatures and cultures of the Global South, El-Eid studies diverse narratives pertaining to the Druze’s widely held ethnoreligious belief in reincarnation. Through her work, El-Eid has introduced the concept of “Druze afterlives” to provide a new way of understanding how trauma marks not only the minds and bodies of survivors, but a transmigrating soul. In doing so, El-Eid examines the ways empire, war, trauma, memory, and gender intersect within and across the borders, bodies, and stories of the transnational Arab world. Having received her Ph.D. in English from Syracuse University, Natalie El-Eid was the 2024-2025 American Druze Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. For this book, El-Eid also received the 2025-2026 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Marwan M. and Ute Kraidy Centennial Fellowship in the Study of the Arab World and Latin America.
Project: Druze Afterlives: Between Bodies and Borders
This book centers the testimonies of the transnational Druze, an ethnoreligious community indigenous to the Levant of which I am a member. The Druze, within and beyond the Arab world, are widely associated with a secrecy and esotericism compounded by the fact that converts have not been permitted into the religion since the 11th century, i.e., today, one must be born Druze to be Druze. One of the defining and well-known aspects of the Druze, however, is their widely held collective religious and cultural belief in reincarnation, a belief within the Arab world almost singular to the Druze. Rooted in the discipline of transnational SWANA literature, this book thus curates and analyzes testimonies and stories of those we call in Arabic the natqeen (the “talkers”)–known as the ones who remember and have spoken about their reincarnation stories—while redefining and expanding critical conversations within and across transnational Arab, memory, trauma, and gender studies, all of which have not fully (if at all) contended with the transformations a critical study of the Druze enables.
Drawing new lines of connection among these fields of thought, my research shows that almost every Druze reincarnation story involves a violent and/or traumatic past-life death. These testimonies are thus explicitly connected to acts of bearing witness, storytelling, and testifying to trauma, specifically here within the context of what I frame as the ongoing Lebanese Civil War. In this critical study, I analyze a selection of discursive texts that engage Druze voices within traditional media genres such as novel and film, in tandem with oral interviews that I have conducted with Druze peoples in the U.S. and Lebanon. In these analyses, I examine the critical and understudied roles Druze natqeen play in breaking the ongoing violent state-enforced silences surrounding the traumas of the Lebanese Civil War. In doing so, I introduce a concept called “Druze afterlives” as a framework for understanding how Druze reincarnation can help us rethink the ongoing hauntings of traumas in the transnational Arab world, the interconnections between time and space these traumas engender, and, importantly, how these traumas are carried—by bodies, souls, and stories.