Nadia Abu El-Haj                  Associate Professor, Chair

Associate Professor, Chair


Telephone: (212)-854-7628        Email: ne2008@columbia.edu

Prof. Abu El-Haj joined the Anthropology Department in fall, 2002. Previously, she held fellowships at Harvard University's Academy for International and Area Studies, the University of Pennsylvania Mellon Program, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She is, in addition, a former Fulbright Fellow and a recipient of awards from the SSRC-McArthur Grant in International Peace and Security, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the National Endowment for the Humanities among others. Professor Abu El-Haj has lectured widely at the New York Academy of Sciences, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics (LSE), and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. Prior to her arrival at Barnard College and Columbia University she served on the faculty of the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago.

In 2001 she published Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago University Press), now in its second printing. In 2002 this book won the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani Annual Book Award for the best book published on the Middle East that year (an honor it shared with Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled's Being Israeli: the Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship).

Professor Abu El-Haj's work examines the relationship between scientific knowledge and the making of social imaginations and political orders. Her first book examined the practice of archaeology--a historical science--and sought to specify the ways in which it generated facts and to understand how those facts circulated in wider social worlds, helping to fashion the cultural understandings, political possibilities and "common-sense" assumptions. Abu El-Haj's more recent scholarship explores the field of genetic anthropology by analyzing, first, projects that seek to reconstruct the origins and migrations of specific populations and second, the participation of for-profit corporations that offer genetic ancestry testing. The intersection of race, diaspora, and kinship figures prominently in this study, where genetic origins emerge as a shared concern among those who may seek redress or recognition.

Selection Publications

Books:
2002 Facts on the Ground:
Archaeological Practice and Territorial
Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society
University of Chicago Press

Articles:
"The Genetic Reinscription of Race," Annual Review of Anthropology 2007 (forthcoming)

"Rethinking Genetic Geneaology: A Response to Stephan Palmie." American Ethnologist 2007, 34:2:223-227.

"Edward Said and the Political Present," American Ethnologist 2005, 32:4:538-555.

"Producing (Arti)Facts: Archaeology and Power during the British Mandate of Palestine, Israel Studies Summer, 2002, 7:2:33-61.

"Translating Truths: Nationalism, Archaeological Practice and the Remaking of Past and Present in Contemporary Jerusalem," American Ethnologist 1998, 25:2:166-188.

Facts on the Ground: Publisher's Web Page:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/14598.ctl

Reviews of Facts in the Ground in Peer Reviewed Journals:
Chattopadhyay, Swati, [Reviews//Facts on the Ground], Interventions 2006, 8:2:333-370.

Diaz-Andreu, Margarita, "Archaeological Practice and the Nation-State," Antiquity 2002, 76:1140-1142.

Helmreich, Stefan, "Spatializing Technoscience: The Anthropology of Science and Technology and the Making of National, Colonial, and Postcolonial Space and Place," Reviews in Anthropology 2003, 32:13-36.

Zureik, Elia, Review within section on "Crossing Boundaries: New Perspectives on the Middle East," The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 2002, 2:5pp.

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