May Al Dabbagh

May Al-Dabbagh is an assistant professor at New York University Abu Dhabi and has an associated appointment as a global network assistant professor at New York University.

She conducts research on gender and work in the Gulf using a combination of social psychology, public policy, and post-colonial feminist lenses. She has published in Organization Science, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Idafat: Arab Journal of Sociology (in Arabic). Al-Dabbagh has academic and policy publications in Arabic and English mostly and her work has been featured in over 40 local, regional, and international media outlets.

Her current book project, The Messy Middle, is about serial migrants and their experiences of motherhood, work, and belonging in the context of an emergent global city. Her second project, Self Tracing, is a method that uses dialogical exchange and critical pedagogy to theorize intersectionalities in the global south.

She has received fellowships from the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), The Women and Public Policy Program (Harvard), and The Global Institute for Advanced Study and Tisch School of the Arts (NYU).

She currently runs Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought which is part of al Mawrid: Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYUAD.

A graduate of Dhahran Ahliyya Schools (Saudi Arabia), she then received a BA (Harvard University) and a PhD (Oxford University) in psychology. She is married to Hashem Montasser and along with their two children, Abboudy and Loulou, they live a life of continuously shifting positionalities and occasionally poofy hair.