Heath Cabot

Heath Cabot is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in anthropological approaches to humanitarianism, refugee studies, and migration policy. Her research primarily focuses on Greece, examining how asylum seekers and refugees navigate complex systems of Greek, European, and global belonging.

Her research interests encompass humanitarianism, refugee and migration studies, political asylum systems, anthropology of displacement, civil rights under austerity conditions, and intercultural encounters in humanitarian contexts. Cabot investigates how cultural difference is dynamically produced and negotiated in humanitarian settings rather than being a static pre-existing factor.

Her notable publication is the book On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), based on 22 months of field research conducted during her doctoral studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work examines how aid facilities for asylum seekers negotiate different dimensions of belonging.

• Fulbright Foundation support
• Wenner-Grenn Foundation support
• Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship

Cabot has served on the advisory board of the Aegean Observatory for the Refugee and Migration Crisis at the University of the Aegean and on the board of the Greek Council for Refugees. Since 2015, she has been co-editor of the prestigious journal Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR). In Summer 2018, she was a guest professor at the Zentrum für Interkulturelle Studien, where she focused on the intercultural dimensions of humanitarian encounters and participated in courses, lectures, and collaborative research projects.