Jessica Winegar

 

September 28, 2012

 

Jessica Winegar is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work investigates how people articulate understandings of history and political-economic change through cultural production and consumption, in particular through competing notions of culture and culturedness.  She is primarily concerned with the multiple ways that culture projects create social hierarchies and modern subjects while frequently hiding the mechanisms of these processes, thereby contributing to their durability. She is the author of Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (2006). She is also co-author with Lara Deeb Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (2015).  Winegar’s next book project, Culturing Youth: Democracy, Creativity, and Development in the Middle East, charts the meteoric rise, successes, and challenges of state and NGO cultural development programs directed towards poor and working class youth in Egypt. It is based on ethnographic research carried out in Egypt both before and after the 2011 uprising.

 

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.