Rochelle Davis is the Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, part of the Walsh School of Foreign Service, at Georgetown University. Her main research is on forced migration, war, and conflict, particularly Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons. Her first book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford University Press, 2011), 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. She is currently writing a book on the role of culture in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Davis is the lead qualitative researcher on the joint ISIM-IOM project, a 3-year longitudinal study of 4000 Iraqi families displaced by ISIS. She has published articles and reports on displaced Syrians, Sudanese and Somali refugees in Jordan, and is working on issues related to gender and vulnerability -- in particular, Syrian men faced with forced conscription into the Syrian army who choose to flee. For more of her publications, see her Georgetown website.
Grace Benton is Project Manager and Research Associate at ISIM. Grace is proficient in Arabic and holds a Master's of Arts in Arab Studies and a Certificate in Refugee and Humanitarian Emergencies from Georgetown University. She received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and study in Jordan from 2011-12. Grace also worked at the International Refugee Assistance Project as the Egypt Program Director and managed the resettlement team at the Refugee Legal Aid Program at St. Andrews Refugee Services in Cairo, Egypt. Her current research interests and areas of work include internal displacement in Iraq, refugee resettlement, the history of refugee policy across the Middle East, and planned relocations of populations away from disaster-prone areas.
