Lila Abu-Lughod

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Lila Abu-Lughod
Born	1952
Nationality	Palestinian American
Citizenship	American
Occupation	Scholar
Known for	Anthropology, Women's and Gender Studies
Parent(s)	Janet L. Abu-Lughod (mother)
Academic background
Alma mater	Carleton College (BA, 1974) Harvard University (PhD, 1984)
Academic work
Institutions	Williams College Princeton University New York University Columbia University
Website	http://www.columbia.edu/cu/anthropology/fac-bios/abu-lughod/faculty.html

Lila Abu-Lughod (

Abu-Lughod's body of work is grounded in long-term ethnographic research in Egypt, and is especially concerned with the intersections of culture and power, as well as gender and women's rights in the Middle East.^[4]

Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, while she was still a graduate student, Abu-Lughod spent time living with the

Abu-Lughod spent time as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, with Judith Butler, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Donna Haraway. She also taught at New York University, where she worked on a project, funded by a Ford Foundation grant, intended to promote a more international focus in women's studies.^[6]

Her 2013 book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? investigates the image of Muslim women in Western society. It is based on her 2002 article of the same name, published in American Anthropologist.^[7] The text examines post-9/11 discussions on the Middle East, Islam, women's rights, and media. Abu-Lughod gathers examples of the Western narrative of the "abused" Muslim women who need to be saved.^[8] Abu-Lughod further explains how the narrative of saving Muslim women has been used as a way to justify military interventions in Muslim countries. She deftly questions the motives of feminists who feel that Muslim women should be saved from the Taliban all the while injustices occur in their own countries. She argues that Muslim women, like women of other faiths and backgrounds, need to be viewed within their own historical, social, and ideological contexts.^[9] Abu-Lughod's article and subsequent book on the topic have been compared to Edward Said and Orientalism ^{[citation needed]}.

Abu-Lughod serves on the advisory boards of multiple academic journals, including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society^[10] and Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies.^[11]

Awards and honors

In 2001, Abu-Lughod delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the

An article from Veiled Sentiments received the Stirling Award for Contributions to Psychological Anthropology. Writing Women's Worlds received the Victor Turner Award.[13] Carleton College awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2006.^{[citation needed]}

Significant publications

• Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (University of California Press 1993)
  ISBN 978-0-520-08304-2
• Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Editor) (Princeton University Press 1998)
  ISBN 978-0-691-05792-7
• Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (University of California Press 2000)
  ISBN 978-0-520-22473-5
• Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Editor) (University of California Press 2002)
  ISBN 978-0-520-23231-0
• Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (University of Chicago Press 2004)
  ISBN 978-0-226-00197-5
• Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media (Amsterdam University Press 2007)
  ISBN 978-90-5356-824-8
• Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory with
  ISBN 978-0-231-13578-8
• Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press 2013)
  ISBN 978-0-674-72516-4

• Postcolonialism
• Subaltern
• Orientalism
• Imagined geographies

Notes