Rochelle Davis is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her research focuses on refugees, war, and conflict – in particular, Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons. Her first book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced, (Stanford University Press, 2012) won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Award. Since 2010, her research projects have included training refugees and local community members to develop questions and conduct interviews.
From 2015-2022, she was a senior researcher on a joint project between Georgetown University and the International Organization for Migration conducting a mixed-methods panel survey of over 3,000 Iraqi households displaced by ISIS/ISIL/Da’esh to understand their access to durable solutions. She is currently writing a book on the role of culture in the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, using interviews with US military service members and Iraqis, as well as governmental and military policy and strategy documents, cultural training material, journalists’ reporting, and soldier memoirs.
Among the classes she teaches are:cultural heritage and conflict; refugees, migrants and immigrants in and out of the Arab World; and war and conflict. She uses different genres of texts and other forms of media in her classroom to expose students to a wide range of primary and secondary material about the Arab World.