Lila Abu Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University where she teaches anthropology and gender studies. A leading voice in the debates about culture, gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her award-winning books and articles have been translated into 14 languages. The books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds; Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt; Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory; and Do Muslim Women Need Saving? She is on the board of the new Palestinian Museum in Birzeit and is currently working on a collaborative international project for Women Creating Change and supported by the Henry Luce Foundation on “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence.”
At the Graduate Center since 1998, Talal Asad is a sociocultural anthropologist of international stature specializing in the anthropology of religion with a special interest in the Middle East and Islam. He earned his M.A. at Edinburgh University and B.Litt. and D.Phil. at Oxford. Before coming to the United States to teach at the New School, he taught at Oxford and the universities of Khartoum, Sudan, and Hull, England. He was a member of the New School graduate faculty from 1989 to 1995, then joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University. In the spring of 1979, he served as visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Asad specializes in studies of the Sudan, Arabs, and nomadism. Among other books, he is the author of On Suicide Bombing (The Wellek Library Lectures) (2007); Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Cultural Memory in the Present) (2003); and Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993). Asad has also edited or contributed to numerous volumes and has published in a wide variety of international journals. His works have been translated into many languages. The recipient of many awards and honors, Asad has served on the Economic and Social Research Council in England and the Social Science Research Council in the United States.
Naor Ben-Yehoyada's work examines unauthorized migration, criminal justice, the aftermath of development, and transnational political imaginaries in the central and eastern Mediterranean. His monograph, The Mediterranean Incarnate: Transnational Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago Press, 2017), offers a historical anthropology of the recent re-emergence of the Mediterranean. He is specifically interested in the processes through which transnational regions form and dissipate. He proposes to view such spaces as ever-changing constellations, and show how we can to study them from the moving vessels that weave these constellations together and stage their social relations and dynamics in full view. He has also written shorter pieces about the different phases of the dynamics of maritime unauthorized migration and interdiction, as well as on the role that the Mediterranean’s seabed plays in Italian political retrospection.
Michael Gilsenan is professor emeritus of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University. His books include Lords of the Lebanese Marches.
Zachary Lockman is professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (MEIS) and History at New York University, where he has taught modern Middle Eastern history since 1995. He was chair of MEIS from 2004 to 2010 and has also served as director of NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. He served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 2006-2007 and is a member of MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom; he is also a contributing editor of Middle East Report. His main research and teaching field is the social, cultural and political history of the modern Middle East, especially Palestine and Egypt. His most recent book is Contending Visions of the Middle East: the History and Politics of Orientalism (2004; 2nd edition, 2009). Other books includeComrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (1996); Intifada: the Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation (co-edited with Joel Beinin, 1989) and Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (co-authored with Joel Beinin, 1987). He received his B.A. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton in 1974 and his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard in 1983.
Writing and reading, considered as cultural and historical phenomena, have figured centrally in Brinkley Messick’s research on Islamic societies in both Arabia and North Africa. This work considers the production and circulation, inscription and subsequent interpretation of Arabic texts such as regional histories, law books, and court records. Messick has sought to understand the relation of writing and authority, events such as the advent of print technology, hybrid contemporary practices of reading, and local histories of record keeping and archiving. Much of this work dovetails with Messick's general interests in legal anthropology and legal history, and with his specific interests in Islamic law.
Maya Mikdashi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her first book Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (SUP, 2022) theorizes the relationships between sexual difference and political difference, the religious and the secular, and law, bureaucracy, and biopower. Her work is grounded in ethnographic and archival research, and has been translated into Arabic, Turkish, French, Spanish, and German. Maya has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She has also been published in peer-reviewed edited volumes and in public-facing venues. She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya.
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional political theory. Educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia, he teaches courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things. Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt (1991), a study of the emergence of modern modes of government in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. Translations of the book have appeared in several languages, including Arabic, German, Polish, Turkish, and Japanese.
