TERG Cohort 2 Trainers

Suad Joseph 

Dr. Suad Joseph completed her PhDinAnthropologyat Columbia University. She is General Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Brill 2003-2007) and EWIC Online (2009 -present). She is editor and co-editor of 8 books,andauthorof over 100 articles.  She founded the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology (the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association); the Association for Middle East Women's Studies; the Arab Families Working Group; and a Consortium of 5 universities in Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine, with UC Davis where she is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor. She is also the founding Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at UniversityofCalifornia, Davis.  She co-founded the Association for Arab American Studies and the Association for Middle East Anthropology. She was recognized at UC Davis for service by receiving the Graduate Mentor; the Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award; Chancellor's Award for Diversity and Community; and the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Research.  She was President of the Middle East Studies Association of North American.  She has received grants from the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the International Development Research Center, the Population Council, UNICEF, the Swedish Institute of Alexandria, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, the Open Society Institute and other funders.  She has taught proposal writing and research design for over 30 years.  (http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu )

Nadine Naber

Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Chicago

Nadine Naber is a Professor in Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  She received her Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis. Dr. Naber has authored and co-edited five books including Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012); Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, 2008); Arab and Arab American Feminisms, winner of the Arab American Book Award 2012 (Syracuse University Press, 2010); The Color of Violence (Duke University Press, 2016); and Towards the Sun (Tadween Publishing-George Mason University, 2018). As a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2003-2013), she co-founded the academic program, Arab and Muslim American Studies. In 2013, she relocated to the University of Illinois at Chicago where is the faculty founder of the Arab American Cultural Center. Today, Dr. Naber is developing a collaborative scholar-activist project, “Pedagogies of the Radical Mother” with members of the Black Youth Project 100 and the Arab American Action Network focusing on the impact of war and police violence on Black and Arab mothers while uplifting mother-based activism in Chicago and across the U.S.

Follow Professor Naber here.

Zeina Zaatari

Dr. Zeina Zaatari is a lecturer and research associate at the University of California, Davis and is an independent consultant focusing on gender and sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa. Previously, she worked as the Regional Director for the MENA Program at Global Fund for Women, (2004-2012). She earned her PhDinCulturalAnthropology with an emphasis in Feminist Theory from the University of California, Davis. Her publications include “Desirable Masculinity/Femininity and Nostalgia of the “Anti-Modernity”: Bab el-Hara Television Series as a Site of Production” in Sexuality and Culture (2014), “Re-Imagining Family, Gender, and Sexuality: Feminist and LGBT Activism in the context of the 2006 Invasion of Lebanon” co-written with Nadine Naber in Cultural Dynamics (2014), “Arab Feminist Awakening: Possibilities and Necessities” in Arab Feminisms: A Critical Perspective (2014 & 2012). She currently serves as Secretary of the Board of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, the Associate Editor for the Middle East and Europe FOR THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WOMEN AND ISLAMIC CULTURES (EWIC) and is a core group member of the Arab Families Working Group.

Lena Meari 

Dr. Lena Meari is an Assistant Professor at the Social and Behavioral Science and the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine. She receivedherPhDinCultural Anthropology with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research from the University of California, Davis.  Her dissertation, titled “Sumud:  A Philosophy of Confronting Interrogation,” investigates transforming colonial relations in colonized Palestine from the perspective of the interrogation encounter. She taught several courses, including Anthropology of the Middle East at the University of California, Davis, as well as Critical Theories in Gender and Development and Qualitative Research Methods for graduate students at Birzeit University.  She was the first recipient of the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Columbia University.