Katya holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in African Studies from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Gibel Mevorach is a Professor in Anthropology and American Studies at Grinnell College.
Dr. Gibel Mevorach is author, under name, Katya Gibel Azoulay of Black, Jewish and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity (Duke University Press, 1997). Journals in which her articles, review essays and position papers have appeared include American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Biography, Developing World Bioethics, Identities, Cultural Studies, Research in African Literatures, Noga (Israeli Feminist Journal) and The Jerusalem Post (Israel). Gibel Mevorach has dual American - Israeli citizenship. She moved to Israel in 1970 after graduating from The Brearley School in New York and returned to the U.S. in 1991 to pursue doctoral studies and was invited to join Grinnell College as a Scholar-in-Residence in January 1996. Gibel Mevorach has served as Chair of the Africana Studies Concentration from 1996-2000 and in 2003 helped initiate the transition of Africana Studies into an expanded American Studies Concentration, serving as the new Chair between 2004 and 2005. As an invited speaker at various colleges and universities around the country, she has addressed the topics of issues of identity and social science categories, "race" and the curriculum, and diversity in higher education, and was a member of Grinnell College's Diversity Steering Committee between 2002 and 2005.