Catherine (Cat) Abou Khalil

Cat completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at Boston University in the summer of 2026. She is currently a Teaching Associate in Political Science at Boston University. During her time at BU, she served as the former Graduate Co-Chair of the Forced Migration and Human Trafficking Initiative, and she was a Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellow at the Center on Forced Displacement and a Graduate Student Affiliate with the Center for Innovation in Social Science. She also completed her graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and received the Henry S. Newman Graduate Student Fellowship to work on her dissertation research.

Her research interests lie within the intersection of international relations and comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Middle East. Her interests include migration and development, transnational mobilization, gender, feminist international political economy, post-conflict recovery, and impacts of technological developments on transnational politics. Her dissertation, “Remittances Across Time: The Lebanese Diaspora and their Grassroots Efforts to Mobilize Care Remittances for Lebanon,” analyzed how and why diasporas mobilize remittances to send to their homeland during and after times of crisis and instability. Her main research agenda theorizes how diasporas and transnational communities sustain social, political, and economic ties during crises and across time.

Cat joined the program in the fall of 2020 after receiving her B.A. in Political Science and International Relations and a double minor in Arabic Studies and Writing from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell in the spring of 2020. While there, she also interned as Volunteer Coordinator and Student Curriculum Supervisor at SayDaNar Community Development Center, a non-profit organization in Lowell, MA that works with refugees from Myanmar.