Lila Abu-Lughod
Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science; Professor of Anthropology
Lila Abu-Lughod teaches anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University. She is a former director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Center for the Study of Social Difference, and the Middle East Institute, all at Columbia. A leading voice in the debates about gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her books and articles have been translated into 13 languages. Her scholarship, strongly ethnographic, has focused on the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation of the Arab and Muslim worlds; and the dynamics of gender and the question of human and women’s rights in the Middle East. Her award-winning books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories; Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East; and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Her most recent book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, was published by Harvard University Press in 2013.