Jen'nan Ghazal Read received her PhD in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Rice University and the University of Texas School of Public Health.  She joined Duke University in 2008 as an associate professor of sociology and global health (with tenure) and is currently the Associate Director for Special Initiatives at the Duke Islamic Studies Center. 

Read is a Carnegie Scholar whose research focuses how culture and religion shape the assimilation experiences of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, including issues of women’s employment, immigrant health, and political integration.  She has built on this expertise to include examinations of inequality among other U.S. racial and ethnic groups and among Arabs and Muslims elsewhere in the world.  Read is author of Culture, Class and Work among Arab-American Women (LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004) and has published numerous scholarly articles on how race, ethnicity and gender interact to affect immigrant integration across domains of social life.  Her work has cited by The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as numerous regional and local media outlets.  She has appeared as an expert on numerous national and international shows, such as the Charlie Rose Show, National Public Radio, Al-Jazeera English, and Al-Hurra.