Jessica Winegar

Assistant Professor (PhD New York University 2003)

1812 Hinman Avenue, Room 303

(847) 491-4831

j-winegar@northwestern.edu

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS: Sociocultural Anthropology, cultural politics and culture industries, material and visual culture, the culture concept, class, gender, Islam, Middle East and North Africa.

Jessica Winegar is a sociocultural anthropologist who is primarily concerned with how understandings of history and social change are articulated through cultural production and consumption, in particular through competing notions of culture and culturedness. Her first book, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in contemporary Egypt focuses on the visual arts. It is an ethnographic study of the intense debates over cultural authenticity and artistic value that occur in a postcolonial society undergoing market liberalization. It examines how culture elites reckon with the legacies of colonialism, socialism, and modernism in order to produce meaningful, yet competing, versions of national visual culture in a context where "culture" itself is becoming increasingly globalized and commodified.

Her second book project examines the tensions and overlaps between various secular and Islamic notions of culture and culturedness as they are embedded in particular institutional projects in Egypt. The book explores why “culture” has become so important to postcolonial state governance, and to religious projects to create moral communities, in an era of waning state legitimacy, transnational media and religious movements, and economic restructuring. It is based on comparative ethnographic research on the cultural programs of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and private Islamic organizations, especially those aimed at women, youth, and rural people.

Winegar has also published numerous scholarly and popular articles on Middle Eastern visual arts and artists, North African visual culture, U.S. consumption of Middle Eastern arts, U.S. media coverage of the Middle East, and on U.S. academia. She has played an active role in ArteEast, an arts organization dedicated to supporting and promoting artists from the Middle East and its diasporas. Winegar is also a founding member of the Task Force for Middle East Anthropology, a group dedicated to increasing the relevance, visibility, and application of anthropological perspectives on the Middle East.

Winegar has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, and the Mellon Foundation. She has enjoyed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the School for Advanced Research.

COURSES:

Anthropology of the Middle East

Middle Eastern Popular Culture

Art and Society

Anthropology of Museums

Culture and Consumption

Contemporary Anthropological Theory

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2006). Winner of the 2007 Albert Hourani Book Award, given by the Middle East Studies Association for the best book in Middle East studies

2009 “The Question of Africanity in North African Visual Culture,” Special issue of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. Co-edited with Katarzyna Pieprzak.

2008 “Purposeful Art Between Television Preachers and the State,” ISIM Review (International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World)

22:28-29.

2008 “The Humanity Game: Art, Islam, and the War on Terror,” Anthropological Quarterly, 81(3):651-681.

2008 “A Hometown Artist of the World.” In Muslim Voices and Lives in the

Contemporary World. Frances Trix, John Walbridge, Linda Walbridge (eds),

pp. 159-161. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

2007 “Framing Egyptian Art: Western Audiences, Islam, and Ancient Egypt.” In Peripheral Insider: Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture. Khaled Ramadan and Stine Hoxbroe (eds), pp. 140-155. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press.

2007 “Women, Gender, and Visual Arts: Egypt.” Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, Volume 5. Leiden: Brill.

2006 “Cultural Sovereignty in a Global Art Economy: Egyptian Cultural Policy and the New Western Interest in Art from the Middle East.”

Cultural Anthropology 21(2):173-204.

2005 “Of Chadors and Purple Fingers: U.S. Visual Media Coverage of the Iraqi Elections.” Feminist Media Studies 5(3):391-395.

2005 “Academics and the Government in the ‘New American Century’: a conversation with Rashid Khalidi.” Co-authored with Lori A. Allen and Lara Deeb. Radical History Review, 93:240-259. [Special issue on “Homeland Security” which won the “Best Special Issue” award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.]

2004 “The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt.” Al-Adab

52(1-2):55-56 (in Arabic).

2002 “In Many Worlds: a discussion with Egyptian artist Sabah Naeem.” Meridians: a journal of feminism, race, transnationalism 2(2):146-162.