Professional Background
Evan Easton-Calabria is a research assistant professor at the Feinstein International Center and Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a research associate at the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on historical and contemporary forced displacement, humanitarianism, refugee self-reliance, and the ways people and institutions respond to displacement, conflict, and crisis. She holds a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is the author of more than 85 publications on humanitarianism and development, including Refugees, Self-Reliance, Development: A Critical History (Bristol University Press, 2022) and The Global Governed? Refugees as Providers of Protection and Assistance (co-authored, Cambridge University Press, 2020). She is currently co-authoring a book on the future of humanitarian protection for Oxford University Press.
Fellowship Research
As a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellow, Dr. Easton-Calabria will conduct research for her project, “Exploring Relationships of Parenting and Activism During the Holocaust.” The project asks: How does the experience of parenting shape choices and decisions relating to activism, and how does activism influence one’s parenting? How did both parenting and activism change during the Holocaust, and how may they have informed one another? In particular, she seeks to better elucidate the ways and extent to which the actions and activities of parenting, the responsibilities of parenting, as well as the feelings of parenting and caretaking impacted or impeded different types of activism, as well as how engagement with activism altered Holocaust victims’ relationship to parenting. Dr. Easton-Calabria will examine Museum collections on resistance, with a focus primarily on oral histories, memoirs, and diaries. She plans to use the fellowship research toward an academic journal article, as well as the basis for a larger, multi-year, comparative project exploring parenting and activism in historical and contemporary perspective across different contexts of persecution.
Residency Period: November 1, 2026 - April 30, 2027