Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching the effects of war on Christianity in Syria. He is a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Granada, and holds a PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. He has previously held Marie Skłodowska-Curie and National Endowment for the Humanities postdoctoral fellowships.

Prior to Syria, he researched extensively in Palestine. He is the author of Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference (University of Toronto Press, 2024), which explores a model of Romani alterity based on how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together in a way that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference, nor detectable by the antennas of the state. He is also co-editor of Naseej: Life-Weavings of Palestine (Pluto Press, 2025), a multidisciplinary volume on plurality in Palestine.

He is currently working on a second monograph based on his Syria research, tentatively titled Sadness of the East: Refractions of Christianity in Syria.