Rate My Professor Douaa Sheet

Douaa Sheet is a cultural anthropologist whose research centers on human rights, transitional justice, dignity, and political transitions in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly post-uprising Tunisia. She received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology with distinction from the City University of New York Graduate Center in September 2021. Her doctoral dissertation, "The Politics of 'Dignity' and the Tunisian Truth Commission: Keywords, Violence, Human Rights," advised by Vincent Crapanzano, provides an ethnographic analysis of the Truth and Dignity Commission (2014-2018). It explores how different victim groups—defined by gender, religion, and class—made competing appeals to dignity in seeking reparations for state violence under the previous regime, highlighting the role of moral values in the Arab Spring's aftermath.

Throughout her career, Sheet has been affiliated with Baruch College, CUNY, where she served as a Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Anthropology department. Following her PhD, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan's International Institute during the 2022-2023 academic year before joining American University as an Assistant Professor in the School of International Service. Her peer-reviewed publications include “National Reconciliation in the Age of New Social Media” in Cultural Anthropology (2023), which examines how social media impeded reconciliation through a "war on silence," and “On Conceptions of Time in Human Rights Studies: The Afterlife, Islam, and Reparative Justice in Post-Uprising Tunisia” in the Journal of Human Rights (2023), discussing Islamic temporal frameworks like thawāb in reparative justice. She is currently developing her first book, Suspended Transitions: Dignity, Truth and Reconciliation in Tunisia, based on ethnographic fieldwork including public hearings, consultations, protests, and victim testimonies. Sheet's scholarship addresses carceral temporalities, the limitations of trauma theory, and the dynamics of national reconciliation in democratic transitions.