It’s our great pleasure today to introduce Rebecca Gould as an IntLawGrrls contributor. Rebecca is Reader in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Bristol in the UK. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern and Comparative Literatures from Columbia University, and has taught at New York University, Columbia University, and Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Her work deals with Muslim migration and forced displacement, law and culture in the Caucasus, political theory, postcoloniality, and transnational feminism. She is the author of Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), and the translator of After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central European University Press, 2015). She writes on politics and culture in the Islamic world for Project Syndicate, Transitions Online, Open Democracy, World Policy Journal, and Informed Comment.

From 2014-5, Rebecca led a project, funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, on forced displacement in the Caucasus. She has conducted fieldwork with Chechens in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, with Daghestanis on the Georgian-Daghestani border, and in Palestine. Her research has been supported by the Van Leer Institute (Jerusalem), Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Studies, the International Research & Exchanges Board, and the American Councils for International Education. For many years,Gould was a founding member of the Chechnya Advocacy Network, a grassroots organization dedicated to raising public awareness of Chechen refugees. Her first post will discuss her new project to help Georgian IDPs create a sense of place and preserve their local histories amid their displacement. Heartfelt welcome!