Hello world!

By snissler

Sophia Nissler is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in the Geography program and is affiliated with the university's Middle East Center (CMEIS). She is a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship awardee, a yearlong fellowship granted to study Arabic. Her research interests intersect in feminist geography and geopolitics, labor migration, climate migration, and the feminization and racialization of migration. Additionally, she is working with her adviser, Dr. Banu Gökariksel, as a research assistant for a project on refugee resettlement in North Carolina. She received her M.A. in Global Studies from UNC-CH in 2023, writing a capstone paper on migrant domestic worker organizing in contemporary Beirut. She served the Global Studies and Geography departments as a teaching assistant throughout the duration of the program. During her second year in the Global Studies program, she served as the editor-in-chief of the department’s student-founded journal, The Globalist. In 2021, she graduated from Davidson College with departmental honors in the History and Arab Studies departments and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. For the honors history thesis program at Davidson College, she conducted research on Moroccan labor migration to Germany in the 1960s. Furthermore, she conducted field research and wrote a capstone on drag culture in Beirut during the 2019 October Revolution in Lebanon. In addition to publishing papers as an undergraduate in the Davidson College History and Middle Eastern Studies journals, she is the co-author with Dr. Rebecca Joubin of “Escape to Germany in Syrian Television Drama: From Cross-Cultural Gender Constructions to Transnational Tropes of Masculinity and Homeland,” an article appearing in the Autumn 2021 edition of the Middle East Journal.