Livia Wick is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. She grew up in Ramallah, Palestine, earned a BA from Brown University, an MA from the Institut National des Langues and Civilisations Orientales in Paris and a PhD from MIT. She started working at AUB in 2007.
Her research and teaching interests lie in the overlapping themes of disease and illness, birth, gender, and oral history. She conducted field research in Palestine and Lebanon. Her research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Palestinian American Research Center. Her book entitled Sumud: An Ethnography of Birth, Oral History and Persistence in Palestine explores birth during the Second Intifada (uprising) in Palestine. It follows stories about birth in various sites of the medical infrastructure in the Central West Bank, from hospitals, to village clinics and homes. It explores the lives and work of mothers, doctors, midwives, nurses and families in a context of shrinking and militarized spaces.
She also serves as director of the Reproductive Health Working Group in Arab Countries and Turkey (RHWG) https://www.rhwg.org/.
Publications with AUB Press: