Dawn Chatty

Dawn Chatty, (born October 16, 1947) is an American Emerita professor of anthropology and forced migration, who specialises in the Middle East, nomadic pastoral tribes, and refugees. From 2010 to 2015, she was a professor of anthropology and forced migration at the University of Oxford and from 2011 to 2014, director of the Refugee Studies Centre.

Early life and education Chatty was born on October 16, 1947, in New York City, United States, to Diaeddine Chatty and Eleonora Swanson (née Dorfman). She was educated at Wakefield High School in Arlington County, Virginia, and was a member of the class of 1965. She studied anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) honours degree. She then studied social development at the International Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, from which she graduated with a Master of Arts (MA) degree. In September 2004, she was promoted to a Reader in forced migration. From October 2005 to September 2007, she held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship; the research she conducted during this period was published as Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East (2010). In January 2012, she was awarded a Title of Distinction as Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration.

In 2015, Chatty retired from full-time academia and was appointed an Emerita Fellow of St Cross College and an Emerita Professor of the University of Oxford. She is a visiting professor of anthropology at New York University's Abu Dhabi campus.

Chatty's 2018 book Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State, an overview of 150 years of forced migration into and out of Syria for the general public was criticized in one review for containing errors of fact and of omission, in particular, in discussion the multiple causes of the Syrian Civil War, Chatty omits any discussion of the Syrian government's longstanding support of multiple Palestinian militant organizations, and omits discussion of the destruction and depopulation of Syria's Yarmouk Camp, which contained 110,000 people, most of them descendants of Palestinian refugees, at the beginning of the war.

Personal life In 1979, Chatty married Oliver Nicholas Patrick Mylne. Together they have two children: one son and one daughter.

Selected works