Understanding Syria

After 54 years of brutal dictatorship and 14 years of merciless war, Syrians have achieved their freedom. How did the Syria get here? What challenges and opportunities lie ahead? Northwestern University Professor Wendy Pearlman explores these questions, drawing from interviews that she conducted with more than 500 displaced Syrians around the world over the past 13 years and featured in her two books, We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (2017) and The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (2024). Combining these moving personal stories with her own political analysis, Pearlman puts the stunning collapse of the Assad regime in a broader historical context and reminds us of what is at stake, in human terms.

Biography

Wendy Pearlman is the Jane Long Professorship of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She earned her PhD from Harvard, has studied Arabic and the Arab world for thirty years, and is the author of six books and more than 40 academic articles or book chapters on the Middle East. Since 2011, she has interviewed more than 500 Syrians around the world about their life experiences. She shares their testimonials in two books. We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, published in 2017 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, is a mosaic of personal testimonials chronicling the Syrian uprising, war, and displacement crisis. The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, published in 2024, interweaves narratives of displaced Syrians on five continents reflecting on losing home, searching for home, and rethinking the meaning of home.

Suggested Reading

Pearlman, Wendy. We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria. Custom House, 2018.

Pearlman, Wendy. The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2024.