Profile

Michele Ruth Gamburd is a cultural anthropologist, and studies labor migration from Sri Lanka to the Middle East, focusing on women who work as domestic servants in Saudi  Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE. More broadly, Professor Gamburd is interested in how the oil economy draws guest workers to the Gulf, how workers experience their time in the Gulf, in how worker remittances affect their families and the  economics in their sending countries, and how migration affects social  relations (local hierarchies of status, class, and gender) in the sending and receiving countries.

In October 2010 she participated in a Roundtable Discussion on Oil Worlds: People, Places, and Petroleum at the Portland Center for Public Humanities.