Lara DeebAssociate Professor of Women's Studies (on leave 2008-2009) |
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Research Interests |
gender, Islam, modernity, religion, public sphere, time/temporality, memorialization, interfaith intimacies, transnational feminist analyses, Islam, Middle East Studies, Arab American Studies | |
| URLs | link to An Enchanted Modern at PUP | |
| link to merip primer on Hizbullah | ||
| Appointments | Postdoctoral Fellow: Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University (2003-2004 and 2006-2007). | |
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Research Abstract |
My first book explores the relationship among ideas about gender, religiosity, and modernity in the Shi‘i Islamic southern suburbs of Beirut. Based on two years of ethnographic field research, An Enchanted Modern portrays the deployment of a concept of modernity that takes both material and spiritual progress as its core elements, in a community of Shi'i Muslims who consider themselves simultaneously deeply modern, cosmopolitan, and pious. The book examines how individual and collective expressions and understandings of piety in the community have been debated, contested, and reformulated over the past several decades in Lebanon. Women take center stage in this process, a result of their visibility both within the community, and in relation to Western ideas that link the status of women to modernity. By emphasizing the ways notions of modernity and piety are lived, debated, and shaped by "everyday Islamists," this book underscores the inseparability of piety and politics in the lives of pious Muslims. My other publications include articles about Islamic feminisms, the transformation of Shi‘i religious ritual, and Islamist women’s participation in the public sphere. I am currently working on several projects. The first is a conceptual exercise in thinking through the ways that multiple temporal frameworks structure the different ways that the past, present, and future are related in pious Lebanese Shi'i articulations and rearticulations of the Battle of Karbala with contemporary events. This includes analysis of memorialization practices as they intersect with public religiosities and understandings of temporality and history, as well as a consideration of the gendering of these temporal frameworks in different contexts. The second is a new project, still in its initial stages, that focuses on "interfaith intimacies" -- interfaith romantic and marital relationships in the Arab-American community and their relationship to transnational discourses about sexuality and religion. Finally, I am also engaged in an ongoing collaborative field research project on leisure, space, and piety in the Shi'i Islamic community in Lebanon, with Mona Harb of the American University of Beirut. Current editorial and related boards/committees: - Editorial Committee member, Middle East Report - Book Reviews Editor, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies - Co-Editor for Book Reviews, American Ethnologist - founding member, Radical Arab Women's Activist Network - founding member, Task Force for Middle East Anthropology Courses ** Professor Deeb will be on leave during 2008-2009. Frequently taught courses: WS 50A: Gender and Feminism WS 60C: Gender and Religion WS 110A: Gender, State, and Nation (also ANTH 139) WS 166A: Contemporary Issues in Gender and Islam (also ANTH 139) WS 210A: Islams and Feminisms WS 210A: Sexualities and Religion (Christianity and Islam) WS 200B: Problems in Feminist Research: Epistemologies and Methodologies Affiliations at UCI: Department of Anthropology Religious Studies Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies Center for Ethnography Working Group in African and Middle Eastern Studies |
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| Publications | 2008 “Exhibiting the ‘Just-Lived Past’: Hizbullah’s Nationalist Narratives in Transnational Political Context.” Contemporary Studies in Society and History 50(2). | |
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2008 “Les Autres Pratiques de la Resistance: Tourisme Politique et Loisirs Pieux” (with Mona Harb). In Le Hezbollah: Etat des Lieux, ed. Sabrina Mervin, 233-251. Paris: Actes Sud. 2008 “Hizbullah and its Civilian Constituencies in Lebanon.” In The War on Lebanon: A Reader, ed. Nubar Hovsepian, 58-74. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishers. |
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| 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. | ||
| 2006. “Deconstructing a ‘Hizbullah Stronghold.’” The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, 6 (summer). Available at: http://web.mit.edu/CIS/www/mitejmes/intro.htm | ||
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2006. “Hizbullah: A Primer,” Middle East Report and Information Project. July 31, 2006. (Available at www.merip.org). |
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| 2005. “Living Ashura in Lebanon: Mourning Transformed to Sacrifice.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 25(1). | ||
| 2005. “From Mourning to Activism: Sayyedeh Zaynab, Lebanese Shi‘i Women, and the Transformation of Ashura.” In The Women of Karbala: The Gender Dynamics of Ritual Performances and Symbolic Discourses of Modern Shi‘i Islam, ed. Kamran Scot Aghaie. Austin: University of Texas Press. | ||
| 2005. “Academics and the Government in the ‘New American Century’: a conversation with Rashid Khalidi.” (co-authored with Lori Allen and Jessica Winegar). Radical History Review. Issue 93. | ||
| 2005. "'Doing Good, Like Sayyida Zaynab’: Lebanese Shi‘i Women’s Participation in the Public Sphere." In Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies: Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim Majority Societies, ed. Armando Salvatore and Mark LeVine. New York: Palgrave. | ||
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2005. “Silencing Religiosity: Secularity and Arab American Feminisms.” The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, 5 (spring). http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/ |
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| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5264 | |
| Last updated | 08/09/2008 | |
| (This faculty member is (or was) affiliated with UCI, but does not currently have an active appointment with UCI.) | ||