Diya Abdo, PhD

Diya Abdo, PhD, is the director of the The Center for New North Carolinians at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. A second-generation Palestinian refugee, born and raised in Jordan, Abdo’s teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers and Arab and Islamic feminisms with a particular interest in Arab women writers’ narrative strategies, life writing, and the cross-cultural translation of autobiography. In 2015, Abdo founded the Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) initiative which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and assisting them in resettlement. Abdo is the recipient of Campus Compact and Brown University’s Swearer Center’s 2019 Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award. She was named a finalist in the Arab Hope Makers Award (2018) and, along with ECAR, has received the Gulf South Summit’s 2017 Outstanding Service-Learning Collaboration in Higher Education Award and The Washington Center’s 2017 Civic Engagement in Higher Education Award. She has been making presentations about ECAR far and wide, including at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.