Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, teaches anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University where she also directs the Center for the Study of Social Difference and the Middle East Institute. Her scholarship, strongly ethnographic, focuses on three broad issues: the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation of the Muslim world; and the dynamics of gender and the question of human and women’s rights in the Middle East. Her award-winning books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories; Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East; Dramas of Nationhood:The Politics of Television in Egypt, and Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. A leading voice in the debates about gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her books and articles have been translated into 13 languages. Her research has been supported by many foundations including Carnegie, Guggenheim,SSRC and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has just completed a book, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” to be published by Harvard University Press.