Amarat Zaatut

Amarat Zaatut

  • College of Liberal Arts

    Criminal Justice

    Assistant Professor

    Affiliated Faculty

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

Gladfelter Hall, 530

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. She received her PhD in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University, which she completed on a Fulbright Fellowship.

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.

She recently received a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to investigate Muslim immigrants’ integration experiences in traditional and non-traditional immigrant destinations.

Selected Publications

  • Weisburd, D., Ariel, B., Braga, A., Eck, J., Gill, C., Groff, E., Uding, C, & Zaatut, A. (In Press). The Future of the Criminology of Place: New Directions for Research and Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Zaatut, A., Jacobsen, S.K., Fader, J.J. & Wood, J. (2024) Criminologists Perceptions of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice. Journal of Crime & Justice. https://doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2024.2421814
  • Zaatut, A., & DiPietro, S.M. (2023). Revitalizing ethnographic studies of immigration and crime. Annual Review of Criminology, 6(1), 285-306.
  • Zaatut, A., & Jacobsen, S. K. (2023). Fear among the feared: Arab Americans’ fear of crime in an ethnic enclave community. Crime & Delinquency, 69 (3), 630-655.
  • 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
  • CJ 4097: Immigration and Crime