TOUR LECTURERS
Smadar Lavie
Smadar Lavie is a UC Davis Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology and a longtime member of the Cal community. She landed at UC Berkeley in 1979 on a full doctoral scholarship after four years of fieldwork with the Mzeina Bedouin in Egypt’s Sinai and a BA in anthropology, Islamic civilization, and ethnomusicology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She completed her PhD in 1989, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. On her return to Cal in 2012 she joined the Beatrice Bain Research Group (2012–2016) and was affiliated with the Department of Ethnic Studies until her 2020 retirement.
Lavie’s career reflects her global stature. She has held distinguished residencies and endowed chairs at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio (Italy), Dalhousie University (Canada), Centro Incontri Umani in Ascona (Switzerland), and Vilnius University (Lithuania), among others. She was a Fulbright senior scholar at Vilnius University in 2022. Additional fellowships across North America and Europe highlight her role as an internationally engaged scholar.
Her publications include two prize-winning ethnographies: The Poetics of Military Occupation (UC Press), based on her Sinai fieldwork, and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Berghahn/Nebraska UP), recognized by the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies and shortlisted for the Clifford Geertz Prize. She also co-edited the influential volumes Creativity/Anthropology (Cornell UP) and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Duke UP). Her scholarship has earned the American Studies Association’s Gloria Anzaldúa Prize and Wiley’s Top Downloaded Paper Award (Wiley publishes the American Anthropological Association) for “Gaza 2014 and Mizrahi Feminism.”
Lavie is also known for bridging academia and the public sphere. As a graduate student, she co-founded CAFIOT (the Berkeley Committee for Academic Freedom in the Israeli Occupied Territories). Later she co-founded Ahoti (Sistah), Israel’s feminist of color movement, and was awarded Israel’s “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime scholarship and service to Mizrahi and Palestinian communities. She remains a sought-after public speaker who engages both scholarly and general audiences on issues of gender, race, religion, and social justice.
Beyond anthropology, Lavie is a classically trained pianist with a special passion for women composers and conductors, and the mother of an accomplished cellist. She is also a devoted Iyengar yogi, hiker, and jewelry maker. Until the recent retirement of her Malinois, the doggie accompanied her travels around the world.
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