2017 Workshop

Lila Abu-Lughod

Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University

Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University where she teaches anthropology and gender studies. She is a former director of the Middle East Institute, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Center for the Study of Social Difference. Her scholarship, mostly ethnographic and based in Egypt, has focused on the relationship between cultural forms 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 currently directing a project on religion and the global framing of gender violence, with a focus on the Middle East and South Asia. Her books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (2005). Her most recent book is Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press, 2013). A founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia, she has also co-edited, with Ahmad Sa’di, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory.