Contributors

Walter Armbrust is visiting assistant professor of  anthropology  at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University. He is the author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and editor of The Seen and the Unseeable: Visual Culture in the Middle East (a triple issue of the journal Visual  Anthropology , vol. 10, nos. 2–4). He writes on modernity, nationalism, and popular culture in the Middle East. He is currently working on a cultural history of the Egyptian cinema.

Roberta L. Dougherty is the Middle East bibliographer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library. In 1986 she performed with the Reda Troupe for Folkloric Arts in Cairo, Egypt. She writes about the arts in Arab societies and is currently conducting research on the social construction of performance in modern Egypt.

Joel Gordon is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1992). He is currently writing a book on popular civic culture during the Nasser era.

Richard McGill Murphy is a New York City–based writer and documentary filmmaker. He holds a D.Phil. in social  anthropology  from Oxford University; his work focuses on popular culture, politics, and the rhetorical construction of modernity in urban South Asia. His work has appeared in the Times (London), the New York Times Magazine, and the New Republic, among other publications. Murphy is the founder and president of Walled City Media, an independent film and television production company.

Christa Salamandra is a research associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural  Anthropology , University of Oxford, and book review editor of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO). She writes about public culture in Damascus and is interested in cities, media, and consumption. Salamandra is currently working on a project examining transnational processes among Gulf Arabs in London.

Philip Schuyler received his undergraduate degree from Yale and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. An ethnomusicologist specializing in North Africa and the Middle East, he has lived and worked for extended periods in Morocco and Yemen. His special interests are the ethnography of performance and the interrelationship of the arts. Among his publications are an ethnographic film, field recordings for UNESCO and various American publishers, and numerous articles in both professional journals and the general-interest press, including the New York Times and the New Yorker. He is currently associate professor and chair of the Ethnomusicology Division in the School of Music at the University of Washington.

Anthony Shay is the founder/director of the AVAZ International Dance Theater, a company devoted to the performance of dances from the Iranian world, which includes Central Asia and the Caucasus. He was honored by President Bill Clinton for his forty years as a choreographer. He holds a Ph.D. in dance history and theory from the University of California, Riverside.

Andrew Shryock is a cultural anthropologist who works in Jordan and Detroit. He is especially interested in modernity, identity politics, and historical ethnography. His book Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination (University of California Press, 1997) received the Albert Hourani Award of the Middle East Studies Association. His most recent essays on Arab-American identity appear in Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (Wayne State University Press, 2000), a volume he edited with Nabeel Abraham. Shryock is assistant professor of  anthropology  at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Martin Stokes received a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1989. Currently he is associate professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (Oxford University Press, 1992) and various articles on music, popular culture, and the Middle East.

Ted Swedenburg, assistant professor of  anthropology at the University of Arkansas, is the author of Memories of Revolt (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and coeditor of Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity (Duke University Press, 1996). He also serves on the editorial committee of Middle East Report. He is currently working on a book manuscript, titled Sounds from the Interzone, that deals with “border” musics from or connected to the Middle East.

Robert Vitalis teaches in the Department of Political Science and is director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He works in the areas of historical comparative theory, the political and cultural economy of business-state relations, and the history of international relations and development theory. His first book is When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (University of California Press, 1995). His second book, America’s Kingdom, will look at the United States and the opening of the Saudi Arabian oil frontier.

Katherine E. Zirbel is a cultural anthropologist and performer who studies narrative, experience, spectacle, and political economy in the context of expressive culture in the Middle East. She has taught at Rhodes College and the University of Michigan, where she received her Ph.D. in 1999. She is currently an adjunct professor at New York University.