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

He is the author of Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference; published in December 2024 by University of Toronto Press. The book 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. A second book published in March 2025 is Naseej / نسيج, a co-edited multidisciplinary volume on plurality in Palestine that is the first book project from Insaniyyat—the Society of Palestinian Anthropologists.