Principal Investigators
Dr. Carrie Preston
Dr. Preston is a professor in the English Department and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, Director of Kilachand Honors College, and Associate Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. Her writing on gender, sexuality, race, performance, and critical displacement has appeared in articles and three books. Her awards for teaching and research include the Methodist Scholar-Teacher of the Year and the Torre de la Bueno Award for a book in dance studies. Her forthcoming book, coming out with Oxford University Press, is titled Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Antiracist Theater.
Dr. Muhammad Zaman
Dr. Zaman is an HHMI professor of Biomedical Engineering and Global Health and Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. He received his master’s and P.h.D from the University of Chicago. In addition to five books and over 130 peer-reviewed research articles, Professor Zaman has written extensively on innovation, refugee and global health in newspapers around the world. His newspaper columns have appeared in over 30 countries and have been translated into eight languages. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and research, the most recent being Guggenheim Fellowship (2020) for his work on antibiotic resistance in refugee camps.
Marina Lazetic
Marina Lazetic is a forced displacement and extremism researcher and Director of Programs at the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. Throughout her academic and professional career, she has worked on projects related to forced displacement, nationalism, conflict prevention, gender, and human security. She focuses on environmental displacement, community organizing, and anti-immigration movements in her research and writing. Marina previously worked for nonprofit organizations and academic institutions such as the Feinstein International Center, Belgrade Center for Security Policy, and Open Society Foundations. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Noora Lori
Noora Lori is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies and an affiliate faculty at the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. Her research broadly focuses on citizenship, migration, and statelessness. She is interested in temporal strategies of migration enforcement and has written about citizenship regimes and naturalization policies, temporary migration schemes, and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective. Regionally, her work examines the shifting population movements accompanying state formation in the Persian Gulf, expanding the study of Middle East politics to include historic and new connections with East Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Lori’s first book, Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf (Cambridge University Press 2019), received the best book prize from the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (2020), the Distinguished Book Award from the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section of the International Studies Association (2021), the Best Book in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Politics from the APSA-MENA Politics section of the American Political Science Association, and an Honorable mention for the Best Book Award from Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS) (2021).