Nadia Abu El-Haj

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Abu El-Haj's first two books, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002 and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012), focused on the historical sciences of archaeology and genetic history. Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-9/11 America (2022) examines the field of (military) psychiatry, and explores the complex ethical and political implications of shifting psychiatric and public understandings of the trauma of American soldiers.