Lila Abu-Lughod is Co-Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.  She is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, and Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her courses focus on gender politics and nationalism in the Muslim world and on liberalism, culture, and the politics of human and women’s rights. A leading voice in debates about gender, Islam, and global policy, her books and publications in major journals, public media, and on the web have been translated into more than 10 languages.  Abu-Lughod's early work was on emotion, poetry, and gender ideology in a Bedouin community in Egypt. As an anthropologist of the Middle East, Professor Abu-Lughod was concerned about the politics of re-presentation and so began to think about ethnographic writing itself, developing a critique of the concept of culture. Interests in gender in the Arab world and in postcolonial theory led to some work on the history and contemporary politics of Middle Eastern feminisms. She returned to the study of popular culture in ethnographic work on Egyptian television soap operas as they relate to national pedagogy, class politics, religious and gender identity, and modern subjectivities. This project led her to reflect on theoretical and methodological questions in the anthropology of media, but especially regarding the cultural production of nations. Questions of national identification, violent disruption, and memory are at the center of work Professor Abu-Lughod is beginning now on the Palestinian experience of 1948. Publications include: Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (1986), Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (1993) and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (2005).