Dr. Sajadian, who graduated in 2022 from the GC Anthropology PhD program, is among 62 scholars selected from a pool of over 2,300 applicants to join the ACLS Fellowship Program, which provides up to $60,000 for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing.

Sajadian, today an assistant professor at Vassar College, is turning her doctoral dissertation into the book, Debt and Refuge: Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon. The project analyzes why and how countless numbers of Syrian refugees who have long-standing ties to Lebanon as seasonal farmworkers went into debt throughout the ongoing Syrian conflict. The work makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and a feminist question of social reproduction, as debt at every scale of life governs how people move across borders.