Lillian Frost is a Ph.D. Candidate in George Washington University’s (GWU) Political Science Department and an ACOR-CAORC Fellow for Fall 2017. Her research focuses on citizenship, refugees, nationalism, and political identity.
Lillian’s dissertation aims to explain variations in the sets of rights and forms of citizenship statuses that host states offer to protracted refugee groups, including shifts in formal laws as well as the informal enforcement of these policies. Protracted refugees are groups of 25,000 or more refugees with the same nationality living in the same developing country for at least five years. Lillian’s research in Jordan focuses on citizenship policies toward different groups of Palestinian refugees over time—cumulatively, the oldest and largest group of protracted refugees. Her research, to a lesser extent, also examines Jordan’s policies toward Syrian and Iraqi refugees. As an ACOR fellow, she builds on ten months of prior dissertation research in Jordan, conducted with support from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program from 2016–2017 as well as GWU’s Institute for Middle East Studies in 2016.
Lillian’s interest in Jordan dates back to her time as an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia (UVa), where her Arabic professor (Dr. Mohammed Sawaie) encouraged her to study abroad at Yarmouk University. She did so over the summer of 2009, while also squeezing in trips to Syria and Egypt during breaks. She returned to Irbid in January 2011 to conduct research for her bachelor’s thesis, which examined the influence of Al-Jazeera Arabic on political attitudes and identities in Jordan. Since then, she has returned several times to visit close friends living outside of Irbid. As a Master of Public Policy student at UVa, Lillian conducted research in Lebanon for American Near East Refugee Aid, where she focused on analyzing a women’s urban agriculture project in Ein el-Helweh refugee camp. Before starting her Ph.D. at GWU, she also worked with the World Bank on social protection projects in the Palestinian Territories, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
See Lillian’s website for her contact information, CV, and further details on her research.
