Presidential Bio

"How did you come to your career in Middle East Studies" is the question we are asked to address in the MESA Presidential biographies. A biography narrates the present from a constructed past. It invents retrospective genealogies from events which may have appeared accidental or co-incidental at the time.

My oldest brother inspired awe with his detailed memory of events as young as one and one half years old. My memory is of smells, tastes, sounds that seem to stir from some ancient place in/outside me. The neighbor's forbidden guavas; Mama Rose's do-not-touch rose garden; cool water on my naked feet on hot summer days as my father opened the irrigation ditches for the ripening orange orchards. Lebanon.

It was not because I was born in Lebanon that I studied Lebanon. It was not because I was from the Middle East that I came to a career in Middle East studies. Accidental encounters, choices that seemed more like backing into life than seizing events. Perhaps one continuity: curiosity, a persistent yearning for sense-making around events which no one had time to explain.

The youngest of seven children in a family of working class immigrants, my memory is of family time, with America (or the world) a background, accessible mainly through the classroom. My brilliant and visionary mother insisted we accomplish what she, as an orphan put to work at the age of 8 or so, had been unable to accomplish – education. Living in a small upstate New York town we stood out as a hard-working family with exceptional (except one) children. Teachers encouraged each of my siblings, who did their part by excelling in everything they did. It seemed as if every few weeks or months at least one Joseph was in the local newspaper for some award or achievement. The caboose understood that non-performance was a non-option.

My first remembered encounter with the "Middle East" outside of family stories, was my 4th grade text book – a picture of a vast desert with a lone bedouin on a camel. Desert? My family spoke of gardens and orchards. Muslims? My family spoke of churches and priests. An occasional reference to "Attrak" (Turks). The only Arabs in my life until graduate school were Lebanese Christians. But I was very aware of class. I was in the "regents" classes, the advanced student group, all of whom came from more privileged backgrounds than I did.

I followed my sister to our local state college (Cortland State, a "normal" school which became liberal arts after I started there), because, in my conservative family, none of the women had left home unmarried. A world opened up, most enduringly under the mentorship of two young Jewish professors who took me under their wings and, without my knowing, prepared me for graduate school. Ephraim (Hal) Mizruchi and Gerard Silberstein gave me private classes and watched over me for several years. In my senior year, an Anthropology course taken on a whim, taught by sociologist Rozanne Brooks, introduced me to the idea of "culture," leaving me dazed and amazed. I switched my graduate school applications from English literature to Anthropology. There were no courses on the Middle East at SUNY Cortland then. Cornell and Pittsburgh offered me full funding, and while my father tried to bribe me with a car to live at home and go to Cornell, I went off to Pittsburgh – my first move away from my family.

I had been moving in other ways. From junior high, I had begun questioning the devoutly religious upbringing I had earlier embraced. At Pittsburgh, under the mentorship of Alexander Spoehr, that questioning found a context in the study of "pluralism" in Malaysia – which I had planned to turn into my doctoral research. With the Department of Anthropology rife with conflict, Pittsburgh was an unhappy place. An accidental meeting with a young man from India led me to Columbia University in the Fall of 1967. Two watershed moments: the 1967 War and the 1968 Student Strikes. With an a-political upbringing and little knowledge about the Middle East, 1967 stunned and confused me. Comments by students at Pittsburgh, apparently directed at me, about the 1967 war, left me trying to understand how the war was relevant to me. The 1968 Student Strikes at Columbia gave me answers which turned my life and my social and political thinking around almost completely. A co-incidental encounter with a Columbia University graduate Anthropology student the summer of 1967 (Nina Glick Schiller) drew me into a transformative network of Marxist student activists in Columbia Anthropology the Fall of 1967, in time for the student strikes.

The summer of 1968, through the intervention of the man from India who was to become my husband, I returned for my first visit to Lebanon. Fifty uncles, aunts, and cousins met me at the airport, as the YWCA Director, who had invited me as a camp counselor in Dhour Choueir, whisked me away. It was a summer of high romance. I fell in love with everything and everyone Lebanese, and made some of my most enduring and formative friendships, including May Rihani and Mary Farha. A course was set: I would study pluralism in Lebanon and continue that high-wire romance with Lebanon and everything Lebanese the rest of my career.

Columbia Social Anthropology had no Middle East scholars then. Robert F. Murphy, Conrad Arensberg and Joan Vincent did their best to guide me. Lucie Wood Saunders, at CUNY Lehman, took me and other young women scholars of the Middle East under her wing, introducing me to Elizabeth (BJ) Fernea, Nicholas and Ferial Hopkins, Dale and Christine Eickelman, Nadia Atif. At the Middle East Institute at Columbia, like a number of Arab American students at the time, I felt alien, though I took courses with Joseph Schacht, Jeanette Wakin, John S. Badeau, Pierre Cachia, and connected with Edward Said. Charles Issawi mentored my work and served on my committee. My fellow students inspired and shaped me during those intensely political years – Marxist anthropology and radical urban anthropology were being dynamically invented by the students; and the new Middle East studies was being born at MESA and AAUG, where Elaine Hagopian and Janet Abu-Lughod warmly guided me.

During those heady days, fieldwork felt like a political and moral mission. My questioning of my own religious upbringing lead to a class-based analysis of the politicization of religion in Lebanon in the early 1970's. Only when I returned, and my chair at Hofstra University asked me to teach a course on "sex roles," however, did I realize that much of my data was accidentally about women. I knew nothing about feminism, no courses had been offered at Columbia while I was there. Friends introduced me to Rayna Reiter (Rayna Rapp) who immediately connected me to Marxist feminist circles, including Karen Sacks (Karen Brodkin), Gayle Rubin, Sherry Ortner, Jerry Sider. Teaching the course and engaging with a stunning group of founding figures of second wave of feminism, turned my research and career towards feminist anthropology.

A small group of Columbia based Anthropology students had ventured into the Middle East. With little guidance from our faculty, we formed our own study groups (Robert Dillon, Arthur Castle, MaryAnn Castle, JoAnn Joseph, Barbara Larson, Rachelle Taqqu), networking with Middle East scholars at universities in NYC ( Marnia Lazreg, Ylana Miller). A fellow graduate student urged me to invite Karl Wittfogel as a discussant on a panel we organized on his work for the American Anthropological Association. To our surprise, he accepted, and also to our surprise, the panel was rejected. The marginal presence of the Middle East in Anthropology circles, motivated me to found the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology (MERGA) in 1975 (later the Middle East Section of the AAA).

A job application which I had not completed landed me the position at UC Davis, in 1976, where I remained until now. Davis offered no Arabic and nor a core of Middle East scholars. Immersion at MESA sustained my Middle East thirst. Feminist circles, however, were thriving at Davis and I was drawn into co-founding the Women's Studies Program in 1980. To create contexts for my evolving feminist work, I founded the Association for Middle East Women's Studies (1985) within MESA. A letter from Brill which I responded to in 1994 but which Brill did not answer for a year, lured me into the now 16-year adventure of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Legal work over four decades to reinstate my father's Lebanese citizenship led me to research questions on nationality, citizenship, rights, and their gendering.

Parallel to this, no doubt because of my intensely familial upbringing and the humbling experience of parenthood, were the enduring questions of family and personhood – which I came to connect with issues of state, citizenship, rights, and subjectivity. An accidental meeting with the Director of the UC Humanities Research Institute at Irvine (Pat O'Brien) resulted in my leading a residency at UCHRI where I had the pleasure of working with long-time friend Sondra Hale and new friend Islah Jad (Birzeit University) and others. The taste of work with colleagues immersed in the Middle East made it difficult to return to Davis. On a long-shot I applied for and was appointed the Director of the UC Education Abroad Program at the American University in Cairo in 1999. Another profound watershed. Working with President John Gerhart and Provost Earl (Tim) Sullivan transformed my notions of what could be accomplished in academia. Accidental connections to funders in Cairo led to a decade of grants which transformed my career once more. In 2001, I founded the Arab Families Working Group and the Consortium of (eventually) 4 universities to work with UC Davis (formalized in 2007), which included American University of Beirut, American University in Cairo, Lebanese American University, Birzeit University, and UC Davis.

Back in Davis in the aftermath of 9/11, 2001, we finally had a small cluster of ME faculty by 2002. Those horrendous events triggered hiring at UC Davis. Working with Omnia El Shakry, Baki Tezcan, Jocelyn Sharlet and our marvelous South Asian colleagues, we founded the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at UCD in 2004 – winning a DOE UISFL grant in 2006 and a PARSA CF endowment for Iranian Studies and a donation for Arab Studies in 2010. It had taken 28 years at Davis before we had a program on the Middle East – and the rich comparative work with South Asia.

A village in Lebanon. A small town in upstate New York. Pittsburgh. A man from India. New York City. Beirut. Borj Hammoud. Davis. Beirut. Cairo. Beirut... Living a Horatio Alger family story, yet profoundly aware of the "there but for the grace of god go I" precariousness of historical accounts, I construct a genealogy. Now 36 years at UC Davis and 40 years in MESA – that's a story, incidentally.