An ethnographer, musician, and teacher interested in creating a more nuanced understanding of Middle Eastern culture and history.

Dr. Dunya Habash holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Cambridge, UK. The daughter of Syrian immigrants to the United States, Dr. Habash grew up in Birmingham, Alabama where she studied piano and history at Birmingham-Southern College. After completing an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at the University of Oxford in 2017, she pursued her interests in music, forced migration, and Syrian politics through her ethnographic study of Syrian artists and musicians in the new diaspora. In light of the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis, her dissertation From Maqām to Makam: In Search of Syria’s Post-Revolution Cultural Imaginary in Turkey offers a timely combination of approaches in ethnomusicology and forced migration studies to investigate how Syrian musicians as agents embed themselves in their new homelands where changes in performance practice, physical space and cultural norms must be accounted for.