Maxwell anthropologist and alumnus Fethi Keles has been named a fellow in the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

The Weatherhead Scholars Program is a highly competitive fellowship established in 1958 to connect outside researchers and practitioners with Harvard University’s resources and experience. Keles is a part-time instructor of anthropology and senior research associate in the Middle Eastern Studies Program, and one of up to 30 professionals and postdoctoral researchers in the 2026-27 cohort selected to study at Harvard for up to one year.

“My experience as an alumnus and an instructor at Maxwell has taught me a great deal about the cross-pollination of ideas that happens in multi-disciplinary spaces of intellectual inquiry such as Harvard’s Weatherhead Center, and I am thrilled to have the chance to leverage that familiarity to advance my research on refugee integration in the United States at a world-class institution,” Keles said.

Keles hopes to further his research on how refugees create social networks as they begin new lives in the United States. His goal is to examine how they procure, circulate and leverage religious, social, financial and other types of information to secure opportunities and resources for themselves as they settle into new environments. 

Keles received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Maxwell in 2014. An expert in refugee resettlement as well as forced migration and displacement, his work has been published in the International Journal of Refugee Law, the International Migration Review, the Nordic Journal of Migration Research, and the Journal of Third World Studies. He has also published a chapter based on his work on Bosnian communities in the Central New York region in the edited volume Refugee Resettlement in the United States: Loss, Transition, and Resilience in a Post 9/11 World (Routledge, 2022). At Maxwell, he teaches Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the United States, Global Encounters, Magic and Religion, Culture and Conflict, and Martial Arts in Cross-Cultural Perspective.