Profile

Helena Zeweri is the President and a founding member of AAAWA. She has been involved in cultural and research initiatives with the Afghan diaspora in New York since 2008. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver. Helena received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Rice University. Her doctoral research examines how family violence prevention programs in Australia represent migrant communities. She has also conducted fieldwork with Australia’s refugee rights movement and Afghan women’s NGOs. Her work is published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Anthropology News, and the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and she has taught courses on global humanitarianism and human rights. Helena has won numerous research awards, including fieldwork grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, and Rice’s Social Science Research Institute and Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Helena completed MAs in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research and in Near Eastern Studies from New York University, as well as a BA in Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.