Middle East Studies

Lila Abu-Lughod

Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University

Department: Anthropology, Gender Studies

Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University where she teaches anthropology and gender studies. Her scholarship, mostly ethnographic and based in Egypt, has focused on the relationship between cultural forms, gender and power; the politics of knowledge and representation; and the question of human and women’s rights in the Middle East and globally. She is the author of Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin SocietyWriting Women’s Worlds: Bedouin StoriesDramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt; and Do Muslim Women Need Saving? A member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia, she co-edited with Ahmad Sa’di, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory and has recently published on art, archives, and museum politics in Palestine. She is finishing an edited volume with Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian from a multi-year project on religion and the global framing of gender violence.