Nadia Abu El Haj

Nadia Abu El Haj (born 1962) is an American academic with a Ph.D in Anthropology from Duke University. She is an associate professor of anthropology at Barnard College.

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. Barnard granted Abu El Haj the faculty's tenure request 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 level 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. She speaks English, Arabic, French, Persian, and Hebrew.