Deborah Kapchan

Deborah Kapchan is an American folklorist, writer, translator and ethnographer, specializing in North Africa and its diaspora in Europe.

[3] After completing her Bachelors of Arts in English Literature and French at New York University while studying flute performance with Harold Jones in New York, Kapchan went to Morocco in 1982 as a Peace Corps volunteer.

There she learned Moroccan Arabic, and in 1984 got a job doing ethnography in Marrakech and in El Ksiba, Morocco, for a project on literacy run by Daniel Wagner.

This experience reoriented her life and in 1985 she returned to the United States to do a Master's degree in linguistics at Ohio University.

Her doctoral concentration was on the verbal art of Morocco and women's performances in the public sphere.