Nadia Abu El-Haj (; born 1962) is an American academic with a PhD in anthropology from Duke University. She is a professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University.
The author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001) and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012), Abu El-Haj was the subject of dueling online petitions arguing whether she should be tenured during the 2006–07 academic year when she was recommended for tenure. Abu El-Haj received tenure in November 2007.
Biography
Early life and education
Abu El-Haj was born in the United States, the second daughter of a "Long Island Episcopalian" mother, and a Palestinian Muslim father. Her maternal grandfather was French and maternal grandmother, Norwegian-American, and she has characterized her religious upbringing as "church twice a year."
Abu El-Haj spent a couple of years in private schools in Tehran and Beirut, while her father was deployed there for the United Nations. She returned to the United States for her university studies, attending Bryn Mawr College for her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science, and going on to receive her doctoral degree from Duke University. Between 1993 and 1995, she did post-doctoral work on a fellowship from Harvard University's Academy for International and Area Studies, focusing on the Middle East. She also received fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania Mellon Program, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She speaks English, Arabic, French, Persian, and Hebrew.
Academic career
Abu El-Haj taught at the University of Chicago from 1997 until 2002, when she joined the faculty at Barnard College. She has also lectured at the New York Academy of Sciences, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics (LSE), and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London.
A former Fulbright Fellow, she was a recipient of the SSRC-McArthur Grant in International Peace and Security, and grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also an Associate Editor of the American Ethnologist: A Journal of the American Ethnological Society and serves on the Editorial Collectives of Public Culture and Social Text. In a 2008 interview with The New Yorker, she said, "I'm not a public intellectual. ... I don't court controversy."
Research
Facts on the Ground
In 2001, Abu El-Haj published Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. In it, she uses anthropological methods to explore the relationship between the development of scientific knowledge and the construction of the social imaginations and political orders, using the discipline of Israeli archaeology as the subject of her study. Arguing that the facts generated by archaeological practice fashion "cultural understandings, political possibilities and 'common-sense' assumptions", she posits that, in the case of Israel, the practice works to serve the "formation and enactment of its colonial-national historical imagination and ... the substantiation of its territorial claims".
Facts on the Ground has been reviewed in both scholarly and popular publications. The book was awarded the Middle East Studies Association of North America 2002 Albert Hourani Book Award which it shared with Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled's Being Israeli: the Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. Negative reviews were intense. The book was also dismissed as 'crank scholarship,' and she was called a 'charlatan anthropologist'. An internet domain was registered in her name dedicated exclusively to defaming her and damaging her reputation.
Other scholarship
Abu El-Haj's more recent scholarship explores the field of genetic anthropology through the analysis of projects aimed at reconstructing the origins and migrations of specific populations. Analysis is also directed toward the role of for-profit corporations offering genetic ancestry testing. How race, diaspora, and kinship intersect, and how genetic origins emerge as a shared concern among those seeking redress or recognition, are predominant themes in the work.