Oral history interview with Lila Abu-Lughod, 2015

Biographical Note

Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology. Her work is strongly ethnographic and mostly based in Egypt. It 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 first book, Veiled Sentiments, was about the politics of sentiment and cultural expression in a Bedouin community in Egypt. Her second book, Writing Women's Worlds, framed as a feminist ethnography, used individual stories to make a larger argument about "writing against culture." Her third ethnography, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt, a contribution to the anthropology of nations and to media ethnography, explored the tensions between the social inequalities that bedevil nations and the cultural forms that aspire to address them. Her writing and teaching has focused on questions of gender and modernity in postcolonial theory, of anthropology and global media, and of violence national/cultural memory

Scope and Contents

In this interview, Abu-Lughod describes her time at Williams College, the Institute for Advanced Study, and New York University. Abu-Lughod cites her appointment at Williams-where she attended a reading group with Catharine A. MacKinnon, Adrienne Rich, and Wendy Brown-as her first engagement with women's studies. Abu-Lughod describes the impact this had on her early work, Writing Women's Worlds. Abu-Lughod then discusses her time at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she worked alongside scholars such as Judith Butler, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Donna Haraway. She goes on to summarize her time at New York University, during which she participated in a Ford Foundation Grant effort to internationalize women's studies. Abu-Lughod recalls the institutionalization of IRWGS and the birth of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD). She describes her role as a transnational feminist scholar at IRWGS, the inception of her post-9/11 essay entitled "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?" (2002), the essay's expansion into her 2013 book Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, and the role the IRWGS community played in the creation of both works. Abu-Lughod goes on to explain the hiring practices of IRWGS; she cites the Diversity Initiative and the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Diversity and Inclusion as instrumental to the hiring of scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Alondra Nelson. Abu-Lughod then describes how the CSSD emerged through a partnership between IRWGS, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Barnard College Center for Research on Women, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Abu-Lughod chronicles the creation of the Women Creating Change Project by CSSD and Columbia's Global Centers and also provides a description of the four projects in conjunction with the "Gender in the World" curriculum in Columbia's Global Centers. In broader terms, Abu-Lughod discusses the goals of the CSSD and the recent achievements of IRWGS. She describes the limitations facing junior faculty and the importance of mentoring within IRWGS

Subjects

• Abu-Lughod, Lila--Interviews.
• Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University.
• College teachers--Interviews.
• Columbia University. Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
• Feminist theory.
• Interviews.
• Murphy, Kristin L., interviewer.
• New York University.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Williams College.
• Women's studies.

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015