Neda Maghbouleh is Canada Research Chair in Race, Ethnicity, Migration, and Identity and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia.

In 2024, Neda was one of 26 individuals appointed by the Director of the U.S. Census Bureau to the 2030 Census Advisory Committee, which provides recommendations on planning and implementation for the upcoming decennial count. Neda has also provided expertise on race and ethnicity categories to organizations like the American Medical Association and the Spencer Foundation.

Her research has been discussed in popular venues like NPR, The New Yorker, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and NPR’s Code Switch podcast.

Research Topics: Race, Racialization, Im/migration, Identity.

Research Projects: Neda studies ethnic and racial categories and identity formation as it relates to immigration and refugee resettlement. Her work is primarily underwritten by two major external awards for which she is Principal Investigator: The Province of Ontario’s Early Researcher Award ($140,000) and a SSHRC Insight Grant ($349,000). Her 2017 book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race, published by Stanford University Press, received honors from the Association of American Publishers and the American Sociological Association (ASA). She and two collaborators, Ariela Schachter and Rene Flores, co-won ASA’s 2022 Oliver Cromwell Cox prize for their article “Ancestry, Color, or Culture: How Whites Racially Classify Others in the U.S.,” published in American Journal of Sociology. Neda is also Principal Investigator of RISE Team: Refugee Integration, Stress, and Equity, which follows 50 Syrian newcomer families over the first 5 years of their resettlement in Toronto.

Maghbouleh, Neda. Forthcoming. “An Invisibility/Hypervisibility Paradox: The Sociology of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol 51.

Schachter, Ariela, Neda Maghbouleh, and Rene D. Flores. 2024. “To Uncover Disparities, Collect and Disaggregate Self-Identification Data for Middle Eastern and North African Americans,” American Journal of Public Health 114(11): 1158-60.

Sharif, Mienah Z, Neda Maghbouleh (equal first authors), and Andrew Boozary. 2024. “COVID-19 Disparities among Arab, Middle Eastern, and West Asian Populations in Toronto: Implications for Improving Health Equity among Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Communities in the United States,” Health Promotion Practice 25(4): 531-36.

Kahil, Rula, Maleeha Iqbal, and Neda Maghbouleh. 2022. “Grandmothers Behind the Scenes: Subordinate Integration, Care Work, and Power in Syrian Canadian Refugee Resettlement.” Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 38(2): 1-18.

Maghbouleh, Neda. 2022. “25 Years of Charles Mills’ Racial Contract in Sociology,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 8(4): 433-442.

Maghbouleh, Neda, Ariela Schachter, and René D. Flores. 2022. “Middle Eastern and North African Americans may not be perceived, nor perceive themselves to be White.” PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2117940119.

Schachter, Ariela, René D. Flores, and Neda Maghbouleh. 2021. “Ancestry, Color, or Culture? How Whites Racially Classify Others in the U.S.” American Journal of Sociology 126(5): 1220-1263.