Jowel Choufani

Background

Program: Anthropology Ph.D.

Year of Entry: Fall 2019

Advisor: Ilana Feldman

Current Research

Jowel Choufani's research investigates how people’s sense of obligation to others comes to be defined, experienced, and materialized across a historical timescape marked by the layering of critical events. Her ethnographic project traces two modes of response—assistance and documentation—that people connected to Lebanon have drawn on to respond to the 2020 August 4 Beirut explosion. This project explores the factors that guide people’s responses to events, how sociality and community boundaries become (re)configured as a result of these responses, and how meanings of critical events change as they accrue over time. Jowel's research interests include social obligation and solidarity, collective memory, politics of identity, and traveling theory. Jowel is currently a doctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut.

Education

M.Phil (Anthropology), 2022, The George Washington University

M.Sc (Nutrition for Global Health), 2016, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

B.Sc. (Nutrition and Dietetics), 2014, American University of Beirut