Seteney Shami

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Insights from the Social Sciences

Seteney Shami

Seteney Shami has been with the Social Science Research Council since July 1999 and is director of the Middle East and North Africa Program as well as the InterAsia Program. She also currently serves as founding director of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), a regional nonprofit organization headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon. She received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Shami's other publications include an edited volume, Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa (SSRC Books, 2010) and "Occluding Difference: Ethnic Identity and the Shifting Zones of Theory on the Middle East and North Africa," which appeared in Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: The State of the Art (coauthored with Nefissa Naguib; Indiana University Press, 2012). Shami has served on the editorial boards of several publications, including Central Asian Survey, The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, and International Migration Review.

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From Our Programs

Teaching and Learning about the Middle East

by Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

A major SSRC project of the past decade, Producing Knowledge on World Regions, has taken an in-depth look at the configuration of regional studies and internationalization in higher education. One component of the project focused specifically on the Middle East, and here program director Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss draw attention to key transformations and continuities in Middle East studies and how they relate to both regional dynamics and American perceptions and policies.

December 20, 2016