Rochelle Davis

Rochelle Davis is a Professor and Sultanate of Oman Chair at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her research focuses on refugees, war, and conflict, particularly in the Middle East, with a specialization in Syrian and Iraqi displacement dynamics. She leads a mixed-methods panel survey of 3,000 Iraqi households displaced by ISIS since 2014, and her work emphasizes participatory methodologies training refugees to conduct interviews. Her first book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (2012), won the Albert Hourani Book Award, analyzing how Palestinian refugees document pre-1948 village life.

Her current projects include a book on the role of culture in U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, examining contradictions between cultural sensitivity and military occupation. Davis teaches courses on Arab society, refugee migration, and conflict studies, integrating diverse media like ethnographies, films, and Wikipedia editing assignments. She collaborates closely with student researchers and policymakers, contributing to initiatives like the Iraq Recovery Project (iraqrecovery.org) and the Wikimedia Public Policy Project.

Davis holds a joint appointment with the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) and has advised on international responsibility-sharing frameworks for refugees in the MENA region. Her work bridges academic research with policy engagement, emphasizing grassroots perspectives in displacement studies.