Nadia El-Shaarawi

Anthropologist Nadia El-Shaarawi studies global public health and migration. Her forthcoming book, Collateral Damage: Iraqi Refugees, Unknowing and the Everyday Lives of Empire, offers important new insights into the effects of imperialism on Iraqi refugees awaiting resettlement. She is also coeditor of the anthology Migration and Health: Challenging the Borders of Belonging, Care and Policy and coauthor of a forthcoming monograph on the Balkan Route. She has also authored numerous articles in top-tier anthropology journals.

In 2017-18, she responded to the refugee crisis in Europe, documenting and analyzing events in real time. She received a highly competitive National Science Foundation “RAPID” grant to support this research and a subsequent major grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. At Colby, she is the associate chair of the Global Studies Program and the faculty associate director of the Goldfarb Center. She also co-created a concentration in global health within the global studies major.

El-Shaarawi started at Colby in 2015 after completing a Ph.D. in anthropology and an M.P.H. in international health at Case Western Reserve University. She earned an M.Sc. in medical anthropology at Oxford University and a B.A. in anthropology and health studies at McMaster University in Canada.