Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University where she teaches anthropology and gender studies. A leading voice in the debates about culture, gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her books and articles have been translated into 14 languages. Her scholarship, mostly ethnographic and based on long term fieldwork in parts of rural Egypt, has focused on the power of cultural forms from poetry to soap operas; the politics of knowledge and representation of cultural "others"; violence and memory; and the question of liberalism and global projects of human and women’s rights, in particular in the Middle East. She is currently working on a collaborative international project on "Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence." Her award-winning books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds; Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt; and Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (with A. Sa’di). Her most recent book, published by Harvard University Press, is titled Do Muslim Women Need Saving?.