Lindsay Gifford

Lindsay Gifford’s research focuses on everyday life under the authoritarian state in the Middle East, and Middle Eastern refugee experiences through forced migration trajectories in the region and into the diaspora in the Global North. 

Professor Gifford has taught in the areas of refugees, forced migration, displacement, Middle Eastern anthropology, and social science research methods.

She is the author of “Homeland (Dis-)Engagement Processes among the New Syrian Diaspora” in The Contemporary Middle East in an Age of Upheaval (James L. Gelvin, ed., Stanford 2021) and “Middle Eastern Refugeehood in the Happiest Place on Earth: Syrians and Iraqis Entering Finland’s Welfare State Bureaucracy” in Un-Settling Middle Eastern Refugees (Marcia Inhorn and Lucia Volk, eds., Berghahn 2021), among others. Her dissertation research focused on informal gendered civil society networks under the authoritarian Syrian state, particularly working-class women’s rotating credit associations.

Professor Gifford holds a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University (2009), supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Professor Gifford also completed a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Anthropology at UCLA.