Ruba Salih is a Professor of Anthropology at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna. After a Laurea in Political Science at the University of Bologna in 1994, she was awarded a PhD in Social Anthropology (in 2000) from the University of Sussex where she was a Marie Curie grant holder from 1996 to 1999.
From 2010-2022 she was based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, first as Lecturer, then as Reader in the Department of Gender Studies and finally as Full Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. At SOAS, she held the positions of Chair of the Centre for Gender Studies and Chair of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies.
Prior to joining SOAS she held a position as a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Middle East Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. (2007-2010) and at the University of Bologna (Ravenna Campus).She has been a visiting scholar at Brown University, at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari. She has been an elected Member of the Board of the Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences from 2015 to 2019. Currently she is part of the Executive Board of the Association of Palestinian Anthropologists, Insaniyyat. She has also been nominated as a member of the Working group on Academic Freedom and Human Rights, in the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Her research interests and writing cover transnational migration and diasporas across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Islam and gender, the Palestine question and refugees, trauma and conflict in the Middle East.
She is the author of Gender in Transnationalism. Home, Longing and Belonging among Moroccan Migrant Women, and of Musulmane Rivelate. Donne Islam Modernita’ (winner of the Premio Pozzale 2011). Currently she is working on a book on the aesthetics of waiting and the politics of return among Palestinian refugees (Cambridge University Press). She has edited several volumes, which include two edited special issues (with Sophie Richter-Devroe): ‘Palestine and Self-determination beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures, and Claims’ in South Atlantic Quarterly (2018) and ‘Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond. On the Politics of Arts, Aesthetic and affect’ in Arab Studies Journal (2014). Her most recent articles comprise: ‘Displacing the Anthropocene: colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine' [https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/34319] in Environment and Planning E. Nature and Space, 2021 (with O. Corry) and (with Zambelli E., Welchman, L.) ‘”From Standing Rock to Palestine We are United”: diaspora politics, decolonisation and the intersectionality of struggles’ published in Ethnic and Racial Studies 2020.
