Her research interests center on issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the context of globalization, urban politics and state-building, and displacement and transnational mobility.
Seteney Shami is founding Director-General of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences since 2012. She is an anthropologist from Jordan and obtained her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. After establishing the first graduate department of anthropology at Yarmouk University, Jordan, she moved in 1996 to the regional office of the Population Council in Cairo as director of the Middle East Awards in Population and the Social Sciences (MEAwards). In July 1999, she joined the Social Science Research Council in New York (from which she is currently on leave) as program director for the program on the Middle East and North Africa (currently) and the program on Eurasia (until 2010). She has been a visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley, Georgetown University, University of Chicago, Stockholm University, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (Uppsala). Her fieldwork has focused on Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the North Caucasus. Her research interests center on issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the context of globalization, urban politics and state-building strategies, and population displacement and transnational mobility.Recent publications include the edited volume Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa (SSRC Books, 2009), and recent articles include “Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Middle East Studies in the Aftermath of 9/11” (co-authored with Marcial Godoy-Anativia, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2007), “Aqalliyya/Minority in Modern Egyptian Discourse” (in Words in Motion: Towards a Global Lexicon, A. Tsing and C. Gluck, eds., Duke University Press, 2009), and “Occluding Difference: Ethnic Identity and the Shifting Zones of Theory on the Middle East and North Africa” (co-authored with Nefissa Naguib, in Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium, S. Slyomovics and S. Hafez, eds., Indiana University Press, 2013).
