Amarat Zaatut

Amarat Zaatut

  • College of Liberal Arts

    Criminal Justice

    Assistant Professor

    Affiliated Faculty

    Programs
    • Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
Office Location

530 Gladfelter Hall

Expertise

Immigration and Crime, Race/Ethnicity and Crime, Communities and Crime, Cross-Cultural Research, Social Inequalities, Qualitative Research

Biography

Amarat Zaatut joined the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University in fall 2018. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, Amarat was a Lady Davis Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University, which she completed on a Fulbright Fellowship. Amarat holds two master’s degrees, one in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University and the other in Criminology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She also has a bachelor’s degree in Criminology and Sociology from Bar-Ilan University.

Amarat’s research focuses on the immigration-crime nexus and the assimilation of immigrants and their children. Most recently, she completed three years of ethnographic fieldwork, using both participant observation and in-depth interviews with first- and second-generation Arab immigrants living in one of the largest ethnic enclave communities in the northeastern United States. She was particularly interested in understanding the role of contextual factors (e.g., neighborhood and community context) and social institutions (e.g., family, school, religion) in the acculturation process of second-generation Muslim- and Christian-Arab immigrants. Amarat is currently working on several publications, including a book manuscript, that pertain to this research.

Selected Publications

  • Zaatut, A., & DiPietro, S.M. (2022). Revitalizing ethnographic studies of immigration and crime. Annual Review of Criminology, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-030421-033048
  • Zaatut, A., & Jacobsen, S. K. (2022). Fear among the feared: Arab Americans’ fear of crime in an ethnic enclave community. Crime & Delinquency. https://doi.org/10.1177/00111287221098580
  • Jacobsen, S. K., & Zaatut, A. (2022). Quantity or quality?: Assessing the role of household structure and parent-child relationship in juvenile delinquency. Deviant Behavior, 43(1), 30–43.
  • Haj-Yahia, M. M. & Zaatut, A. (2018). Beliefs of Palestinian women from Israel about the responsibility and punishment of violent husbands and about helping battered women. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 33(3), 442-467.
  • Zaatut, A., & Haj-Yahia, M.M. (2016). Beliefs about wife beating among Palestinian women from Israel: The effect of their endorsement of patriarchal ideology. Feminism & Psychology, 26(4), 405-425.

Courses Taught

  • CJ 3003: Race and Criminal Justice
  • CJ 2401: Nature of Crime
  • CJ 8228: Race, Crime, and Justice