Middle East Studies

Kali Rubaii

Assistant Professor, Purdue University

As an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University, Kali Rubaii is also affiliated with the departments of American Studies, Peace Studies, and Global Studies. Prior to her appointment at Purdue, she was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of California, Davis from 2019-2020 and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Rice University’s Environmental Humanities Research Center from 2018-2019.

She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz; an MA in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz; and a BA in International Relations from the University of California, Davis.

Her research explores the environmental impacts of less-than-lethal militarism, and how military projects (re)arrange political ecologies in the name of “letting live.” Her book project, Counter-Resurgency: Outlasting the War on Terror, examines how farmers in Anbar, Iraq struggle to survive and recover from transnational counterinsurgency projects.

Since 2009, she has served as president of the Islah Reparations Project, which she co-founded alongside Debra Ellis and Ross Caputi. The Islah Reparations Project is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit that promotes grassroots reparations between those who recognize their complicity in structural violence and those who seek accountability from them. People of conscience are invited to put into action the words they speak and the goodwill they feel when considering their position in the global order and the violence wrought to sustain that position.