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Faculty Bio | |
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Lila Abu-Lughod
Prof
Columbia University
Anthropology |
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Biography
Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science and Gender Studies, received her PhD from Harvard and taught at Williams College, Princeton University and NYU before coming to Columbia in 2000. Abu-Lughod has been particularly interested in building institutional bridges between area studies and women’s studies and has been active in exploring “the awkward relationship” between anthropology and transnational feminism. Currently, she is the director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference and was director of IRWAG from 2004-2007. Her scholarship, strongly ethnographic and mostly based on fieldwork in Egypt, has focused on three broad issues: the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation; and the dynamics of gender and the question of women’s rights in the Middle East. Her books have focused on gender, emotion, and expressive culture; on the politics of cross-cultural representation; on feminism in postcolonial societies; on the politics of national mass media; and on collective memory. As part of an effort to contribute to larger political debates, she is now critically examining the universalist claims of liberalism and exploring the ethical and political dilemmas entailed in the international circulation of discourses of human rights in general, and of Muslim women’s rights in particular. She has authored or edited the following books: Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds; Language and the Politics of Emotion; Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East; Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain; Dramas of Nationhood; and Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. She is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from Guggenheim, NEH, SSRC, Fulbright, ACLS, and was named a Carnegie Scholar for 2007-2009.
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