Sarah Eltabib
Prof. Sarah Eltabib is an interdisciplinary educator, scholar, and advocate for ethical global leadership. A member of the World History Association since 2010, she now serves as Secretary of the WHA, helping guide the organization’s mission and support its international community of educators and scholars. She also serves on the executive committee of the Midwest World History Association and has contributed to the AP World History program as a long‑time reader and leader.
Sarah completed graduate studies in Modern World History (ABD) at St. John’s University in Queens, NY, and most recently a PhD candidate at St. Mary‑of‑the‑Woods College. Her current research explores the intersection of ethical leadership and religious freedom in world history, examining how philosophical tensions, institutional structures, and historical movements have shaped modern understandings of governance, belief, and global responsibility.
Beyond her scholarly work, Sarah has chaired her university’s Faculty Senate for over seven years, a role she approaches with a blend of pride, humor, and deep commitment to shared governance.
Adelphi University
Session
States have long imagined that borders, bans, and bureaucratic choke points can halt the movement of people, ideas, and belief. History tells a different story. This paper examines how religious communities—monks, missionaries, minority groups, ethical leaders, and everyday believers—have repeatedly refused to let states define the limits of their world. Even in eras of surveillance, censorship, and political contraction, these actors sustained global networks through quiet defiance, moral imagination, and strategic adaptation.
Drawing on cases across regions and centuries, the paper argues that religious networks do not merely survive border closures; they often become more inventive, more ethically charged, and more globally connected when states attempt to shut them down. Through underground correspondence, itinerant scholarship, ritual exchange, and the mobilization of moral authority, religious communities carve out alternative pathways of connection that challenge the state’s claim to control.
By centering religious freedom and ethical leadership, this paper reframes global connectivity as a form of principled resistance—a moral practice enacted by communities whose commitments transcend the political boundaries around them. Their actions expose the limits of state power and reveal a deeper truth: global interdependence is not a modern invention but a long-standing human refusal to stay within the lines drawn for us.
In an era once again marked by rising nationalism and the performance of “closed borders,” these histories illuminate what it means to be global after globalization: not a retreat, but a reassertion of moral agency by those who have always connected the world, with or without permission.