Edward E. Curtis IV

By Isaac Leichty, Originally Published by IU News.

From cavernous archives to his sunny top-floor office in Indiana University Indianapolis’ Cavanaugh Hall, professor Edward Curtis has spent his career searching for lost stories of the marginalized. This year, he received major support toward that goal.

Edward Curtis is a professor of world languages and cultures at IU Indianapolis. An accomplished scholar, he has edited or authored 15 books and founded a journal, Arab Americana. His titles, such as “Muslims in America: A Short History,” are well known as foundational and influential texts in the study of Muslim American history. His work in these areas has brought him to collaborate with Indianapolis communities, including leading a community-based history project and hosting an Arab American community fair.

Curtis is also the second holder of the William M. and Gail M. Plater Chair of the Liberal Arts, a position created to discover new areas of study and connect learning with the life of the community.

“When you have that base support, you begin to dream bigger,” he said.

And that dream has expanded. Curtis has recently been awarded two highly prestigious fellowships, the Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, for his research project “The Riddle of the Evil Eye: Religion in Arab American History.”

Both fellowships are highly sought after in humanities research, with the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows accepting only 223 of approximately 5,000 candidates. The American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship is even more selective, with only 63 awards out of more than 2,000 applications.

“There are basically three top fellowships in the humanities: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim and the ACLS,” said Andrew McLaren, the faculty prestigious awards specialist in IU Research. “To get two of them at the same time is almost unheard of.”

‘No one has written about this before’

Curtis said he is confident his project will resonate with scholars of religion as exciting and innovative.

“No one has written about this before, about the religion of Arabic-speaking immigrants in the U.S.; and the fact that the project is about both high and low traditions and how they influenced each other, it’s completely new,” Curtis said.

Curtis’ project explores practices and beliefs surrounding the evil eye, a religious motif broadly found in the Mediterranean among Arab American Muslims, Christians and Druze. Their shared beliefs about the evil eye reveal important insights in how immigrants practice religion both at home and in congregations. Though these awards support his scholarship, Curtis seeks to broaden the impact.

“Beyond the awards, it’s about the ability to tell untold stories, about unearthing hidden transcripts that deserve to be shared,” he said.

To that end, Curtis’ research process resembles detective work, combining interview sources with census records, photographs and objects to get a clearer picture of his subjects. He exercised those skills with his 2022 book “Muslims of the Heartland,” which relied on a unique blend of documents and interviews to trace the role of Midwestern Muslims in the region. It was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2023 by Choice, a publication of the American Library Association, and won the 2023 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Book Award from the Arab American National Museum.

Research-altering discoveries

His current project was kickstarted when Father Timothy Ferguson introduced him to a talismanic scroll once owned by Father George Malouf, a 19th-century Lebanese immigrant who founded Ferguson’s Orthodox church in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Before seeing this scroll, Curtis had hypothesized that practices focused on the evil eye took place in the home, away from the watchful eyes of male religious authorities. However, Malouf’s scroll made him rethink that assumption.

“The existence of this scroll completely changed my research trajectory in the last couple months,” he said.

Curtis was looking for evidence of popular religious practices to prevent or cure the evil eye, expecting to find that Arabic-speaking women performed these practices outside of the congregation and away from male leaders. However, as this scroll was worn by a man who was a priest, it led him to a breakthrough:

“Male religious authorities participated in the same popular religious practices as women did.”

And this is not the first time he’s made a research-altering discovery like this. Working with a team of student researchers, he found a lost part of Indianapolis’ history in a place he can almost see from his office window.

Curtis discovered that Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts, is built on the location of what had been the Syrian Quarter of Indianapolis at the turn of the 20th century. This community was centered on a street that no longer exists: Willard Street. Understanding the experience of Syrian Americans on this site catalyzed one of Curtis’ previous community-engaged projects: Arab Indianapolis. 

“Willard Street shows the displacement and renewal of Arabs in Indianapolis; memories of the street were lost to later generations as life there was so difficult,” he said.

This project would grow to include an Emmy Award-winning documentary, accompanying learning media, events, a heritage trail, workshops and a monument. Throughout the process, Curtis engaged members of the community, both learning and teaching.

“When you do community-engaged research, you build community; you build belonging and mattering,” he said. “Plus, it makes our work more fun, and we all need to have some fun.”

As with any academic, Curtis starts with rigorous research on the subject matter, but as his Arab Indianapolis project has shown, his work and impact go far beyond academic journals. He credits the academic culture on campus for allowing him to explore this greater impact.

“It was being here at IU Indianapolis that changed the way I did academics; they care about translational research,” he said. “Here, projects with the community are supported.”