Nadia Abu El-haj, Columbia University -
Nadia Abu El-Haj is professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Abu El-Haj is the author of 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). Her major research interests lay at the intersection of anthropology and history of science. While Abu El-Haj’s two books to date have focused on historical sciences (archaeology, and genetic history), she is now working on the field of (military) psychiatry, exploring the complex ethical and political implications of shifting psychiatric and public understandings of the trauma of soldiers. Provisionally titled, The Ethics of Trauma: Moral Injury, Combat, and U.S. Empire, this book examines the myriad forms and legacies of violence that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have unleashed, and how it is that so many of its attendant horrors remain hidden in plain sight.
Paper: “Knowing (the) War: On soldiers, Civilians, and Militarism
Kathleen Belew, University of Chicago-
Kathleen Belew is Assistant Professor of U.S. History and the College at the University of Chicago. She specializes in the recent history of the United States, examining the long aftermath of warfare. Her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, April 2018), explores how white power activists wrought a cohesive social movement through a common story about warfare and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting previously disparate Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. Belew is at work on two new projects, one focusing on processes of militarization in the domestic United States and the other on ideas of the apocalypse in American history and culture. Her award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of race, gender, violence, identity, and the meaning of war.
Paper: Conspiracy and Cross-pollination: Radical Fringe Alliances
Darryl Li, University of Chicago-
Darryl Li is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Paper: Evidencing Conspiracy: Hearsay and Narrating the Forever War