Professor of Anthropology
ks28@aub.edu.lbNicely 201AExt. 4368
I am a Professor of Anthropology and Art Studies in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the Fine Arts and Art History Department at the American University of Beirut. A socio-cultural anthropologist and art historian by training, I have conducted three decades of both fieldwork and archival research in the Middle East and North Africa, primarily Lebanon and Palestine, with a focus on the aesthetics and institutions of modernity, and the contemporary practices by which artists and their audiences reshape their colonized, liberated, and post-colonial societies.
Having discovered the value of exhibitions for both sharing and learning about art, I curated Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest (New York, 2023), and co-curated Jerusalem: Actual and Possible, 9th edition of the Jerusalem Show (Jerusalem, 2018), The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener (Beirut, 2016), and Historical Modernisms for ArteEast.org. I am also Cofounder of the Anthropology Society in Lebanon (ASIL, since 2006) and Cofounder and Producer of the Hikayat Walad min Bayrut [Stories of a child from Beirut] (Dar al-Adab, 2004).
My art historical ethnography, Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950, appeared with Indiana University Press, Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa series (2022) and earned both a Barakat Trust Subvention and Honorable Mention for the Fatema Mernissi Book Award in studies of gender, sexuality, and women’s lived experience.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Anthropology of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art
Imaginations/Ontologies
De/Coloniality
Materiality
Gender
Islam
Art Theory and Historiography
Cross-Cultural Art Junctures
COURSES TAUGHT
Graduate Courses:
MENA Modern by Art
The Ethnographer’s Craft; Art, Aesthetics, and Social Change
Performing Lebanon: Taste, Place, and Identity
Anthropological Methods
Undergraduate Courses:
Reading Other Cultures
Introduction to Anthropology
Arab Culture and Society
Anthropology of America
Hands-On Anthropology
Political Anthropology
Cultural Identities and Boundaries
Seminar in Art and Culture
Seminar in Ethical and Epistemological Controversies
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
2024: Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press).
2022: Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950, Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa Series. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
2022: Co-editor with Hannah Feldman, “Whither the Spiritual? Rethinking Secularism’s Legacy in Post-Ottoman Art,” Regards: Revue des arts du spectacle (Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth) no. 28 (October-December)..
2022: “Palestinian Art Talk: A Local Lexicon for Global Art Production,” in In Motion: The Global Politics of Artistic Engagement, ed. Pénélope Larzillière. (Leiden: Brill Publishers): 233-265.
2020: “Start with the Art: New Ways of Understanding the Political in the Middle East” in Handbook for Political Science in the Middle East, ed. Larbi Sadiki. (New York: Routledge Press): 432-444.
2016: “Artfare: Art Talk and Aesthetic Profiling from Napoleon to Neoliberalism,” Aggregate (Fall), for the file “The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS”
2015: “Toward a Material Modernism: Introduction to S.R. Choucair’s “How the Arab Understood Visual Art,” in ARTMargins 4(1, February): 108-118.
2015: “Adding Art to a Checkpoint: Review of Qalandiya International Biennale 2,” Anthropology Now 7( 2): 139-149.
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Anthropology, Princeton University
M.A. in Anthropology, Princeton University
B.A. (magna cum laude) in Art History, Columbia University