Dr Dunya Habash

Dunya Habash is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Her interdisciplinary research explores the intersection of aesthetics, the arts, forced migration, integration, and education in post-conflict settings. She completed a PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Cambridge in 2023. Under the supervision of Dr Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, her ethnographic research with Syrian musicians, artists, and cultural brokers in Türkiye examined the effects of ‘integration’ on performance practices and cultural education among Syrian communities post-displacement. Before and during her PhD studies, Dunya worked as a Public Engagement Coordinator and Outreach Officer at the Woolf Institute. Through these roles she developed and disseminated an interfaith workshop programme based on the institute's Living in Harmony research project alongside a series of teacher resources for RE educators. She is also a Teaching Fellow at CRASSH’s Global History Lab and an affiliated researcher at the Woolf Institute.

Dunya holds undergraduate degrees in Music and History from Birmingham-Southern College (USA), where she embarked on her first substantive and self-directed project with Syrian forced migrants, a documentary film on Jordan’s largest refugee camp for Syrians, Zaatari: Jordan’s Newest City. That work led her to complete an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at the University of Oxford Department of International Development in 2017. Her research has been supported by the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, the Royal Musical Association, the Music & Letters Trust, and the Cambridge Trust.