The Center for Arabic Culture and the Little Syria Project Presents:
'Little Syria", Chinatown and South End, Boston Testimonies from the community"
Presented by
Dr. Lydia Harrington
& Dr. Chloe Bordewich
The Boston Little Syria Project is a public history initiative aimed at drawing attention to the history of Boston’s Little Syria neighborhood (also known as Syriantown), which thrived between the 1880s and 1950s in today’s Chinatown and South End. The project consists of walking tours, a traveling exhibition, a digital map, an upcoming book chapter, and a growing community-based digital collection.
Little Syria Project Founders:
Lydia Harrington is a historian, curator, and co-founder of the Boston's Little Syria Project. Her areas of interest include Middle Eastern art and architecture, the Syrian and Lebanese diasporas, and New England history. She develops exhibitions, historic sites, and archives that foster intercultural understanding and highlight underrepresented communities. Previously, she was the Senior Curator for The Syria Museum, an initiative of the non-profit Syrian American Council that focuses on Syrian cultural heritage and the Syrian diaspora. Prior to that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT in 2022-2023. She earned her PhD from Boston University’s History of Art and Architecture Department in 2022.
Chloe Bordewich is a historian of the modern Middle East and of Middle Eastern diaspora populations in North America. She received her PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University in 2022 and has held postdoctoral fellowships in public and digital history at Boston University and the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute. She is now focused on public humanities outreach and developing new ways of blending scholarship with fiction, performance, and community engagement. She is the author of a bilingual play, Paradise Expressway, and co-founder of the Boston Little Syria Project with Lydia Harrington.
Picture credits:
Picture an the top: Credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Picture on the bottom: Credit: Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library