Lisa Wedeen

Lisa Wedeen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in comparative politics, the Middle East, political theory, and feminist theory. Wedeen received her Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Hanna Pitkin. She has taught courses on nationalism, identity formation, power and resistance, and citizenship. Her work on the Middle East includes Ambiguities of Domination, an ethnographic study of the culture of the spectacle in Syria under Hafez al-Assad. In addition to writing and teaching, Wedeen sits on the Editorial Collective of Public Culture, an interdisciplinary journal of transnational cultural studies.

Selected publications

• "Acting "As If": Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria" (1998)
• "Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria" (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
• "Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy" in Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (2004)
• "Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities For Political Science In "APSR" (2002)
• "Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise" (2009)
• "Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria" (2013)
• Peripheral Visions: Politics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
• "Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science" (2010)
• "Seeing Like a Citizen, Acting Like a State: Exemplary Events in Unified Yemen" in Comparative Studies in Society and History (2003)

External links

• Webpage on University of Chicago website
• Article in Vol 27 No. 18 of The University of Chicago Chronicle