About:

Rochelle Davis is Associate Professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Professor Davis’s research is on refugees, war, and conflict, particularly Syrian and Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons. Since 2010, her research projects have focused on training refugees and local community members to develop questions and conduct interviews. To date, these projects have amassed over 300 in-depth interviews with refugees and migrants in the region. She is also Senior Researcher on Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) and an International Organization for Migration grant conducting a multi-year survey of 4,000 Iraqi households displaced since 2014 by ISIS/ISIL/Da’esh. Her first book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford University Press, 2012), was co-winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award recognizing outstanding publications in Middle East studies. The book addresses how Palestinian refugees today write histories of their villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war, and the stories and commemorations of village life that are circulated in the diaspora. Professor Davis is currently writing a book on the role of culture in the U.S. military wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on research she has conducted since 2006.