**Common Hour will resume in-person this semester with a number of events featuring a lunch of pizza! This week's Common Hour will have lunch thanks to the generous contribution from the F&M President's Office. ** 

BYO Water Bottle!

**Face masks are encouraged at this event**

Dr. Diya Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English at Guilford College. As a second-generation Palestinian refugee born in Jordan, Dr. Abdo has found much success in her scholarship on Arab women writers and Arab/Islamic feminism, released her first book AMERICAN REFUGE: True Stories of the Refugee Experience, and has founded Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) in 2015. ECAR is a model that encourages the partnership between local refugee resettlement agencies and higher education institutions to temporarily house refugees on campus grounds. Alongside Guildford College who has hosted more than 86 refugees thus far, there are several ECAR campuses around the nation, such as Lafayette College, who have worked to transform their college communities into refugee-host sites. 

Dr. Abdo will continue this important discourse of forced migration on F&M’s campus where she will speak on her new book, which shares the voices of 7 refugees who have been welcomed by ECAR. Her talk will discuss the importance of ECAR in supporting the integration of refugees and shaping the American college campus as a place of refuge. 

Including the White House and the United Nations Headquarters, Dr. Abdo has devoted her career to sharing the values of ECAR to institutions around the country. She is the recipient of the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize (2021), Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award (2019), Gulf South Summit’s Outstanding Service-Learning Collaboration in Higher Education Award (2017), and The Washington Center’s Civic Engagement in Higher Education Award (2017). In 2018, she was named a finalist in the Arab Hope Makers Award.