Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Fellow (2026-27)
Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab (she/هي) is Director of the Institute for Migration Studies (IMS) at the Lebanese American University (LAU), where she also serves as Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Migration Studies in the Department of Communication, Mobility and Identity. Her research examines forced migration, refugee governance, queer displacement, gender and mobility, humanitarianism, and migration policy across the Middle East. In recognition of her contributions to the field, she was awarded the Lisa Gilad Prize by the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) and the LAU School of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Achievement Award in 2025.
Prior to joining LAU, Dr. Diab served as Refugee Health Program Coordinator and Research Associate in the Political Economy of Health in Conflict at the Global Health Institute at the American University of Beirut (2019-2021), and as Research and Project Manager at the Lebanese Emigration Research Center at Notre Dame University (2013-2019). She has held numerous international academic appointments, including as Affiliated Scholar at the Center for International Gender Studies at the University of Münster, Research Affiliate at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, Global Fellow at Brown University's Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, Visiting Professor at Sciences Po Lyon, University of Lyon, France, and at the United Nations-Mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica, where she taught in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies. She has also served as Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies at the University of Cambridge, Scholar-in-Residence at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Lund University, Visiting Scholar in Forced Displacement at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre and The Refugee Hub at the University of Ottawa, Fellow of the Internal Displacement Research Programme at the Refugee Law Initiative, University of London, and Inaugural Global Fellow on Migration and Inequality at the United Nations University's Center for Policy Research.
Dr. Diab's research has been supported through several competitive awards and grants, including the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies Seed Grant from Brown University and the Williams Institute LGBTI Global Small Grant at the UCLA School of Law. Between 2023 and 2025, she served as Co-Principal Investigator of the Carnegie Corporation-funded project Resilience and Identity. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Refugee Survey Quarterly, Frontiers in Sociology: Migration and Society, Transnational Mobilities, the Journal of Internal Displacement, and PLOS Global Public Health, where she also serves as Guest Editor for the collection on "Humanitarian Aid, Conflict and Migration."
Beyond academia, Dr. Diab has completed more than 150 consultancies for United Nations agencies, international humanitarian organizations, governments, and civil society organizations. Her work has encompassed humanitarian evaluations, research leadership in conflict settings, gender analyses and audits, and the development of strategic plans for organizations supporting displaced populations throughout Lebanon and the wider Middle East, including in hard-to-reach contexts. She has additionally served as an external examiner, co-supervisor, and academic advisor at institutions including the University of Gloucestershire, Aalborg University, Koç University, the University of Gondar, the American University in Cairo, the City University of New York, Charles University, Leiden University, the University of Luxembourg, and Ghent University.
Through her scholarship, teaching, and public engagement, Dr. Diab remains committed to advancing interdisciplinary, policy-relevant, and community-engaged research that centers the experiences, knowledge, and rights of displaced and marginalized populations.
Fellowship Project: Queer Syrian refugees in Lebanon are often portrayed as passive recipients of protection. Yet they actively interpret asylum systems, advise peers, and circulate knowledge about rights, credibility, and risk. At the same time, humanitarian institutions rely on refugee narratives while filtering them through regimes of legibility that reward particular performances of sexuality, trauma, and deservingness. Drawing on trauma-informed qualitative research with queer Syrian refugees and practitioners in Lebanon, this project examines how human rights knowledge is produced, governed, and valued. Integrating queer theory, feminist political economy, decolonial human rights approaches, and critical refugee studies, it reframes LGBTQI+ human rights as contested fields of power, authorship, and recognition, positioning queer refugees as epistemic agents whose knowledge shapes protection in practice.
Fellowship Project: Queer Syrian refugees in Lebanon are often portrayed as passive recipients of protection. Yet they actively interpret asylum systems, advise peers, and circulate knowledge about rights, credibility, and risk. At the same time, humanitarian institutions rely on refugee narratives while filtering them through regimes of legibility that reward particular performances of sexuality, trauma, and deservingness. Drawing on trauma-informed qualitative research with queer Syrian refugees and practitioners in Lebanon, this project examines how human rights knowledge is produced, governed, and valued. Integrating queer theory, feminist political economy, decolonial human rights approaches, and critical refugee studies, it reframes LGBTQI+ human rights as contested fields of power, authorship, and recognition, positioning queer refugees as epistemic agents whose knowledge shapes protection in practice.