Kirsten Scheid is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History. She researches Imagination; Islamic and Arabic Theories of Visuality; and Modern and Contemporary Art between cultural junctures, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. She co-curated “Historical Modernisms in the Middle East” for ArteEast’s Virtual Gallery (2008), “The Arab Nude: the Artist as Awakener” (Beirut, 2016) which will be hosted in expanded form by the Wallach Gallery, (Columbia University), in Fall 2023, and “Jerusalem Actual and Possible: 9th Edition of the Jerusalem Show” (Jerusalem, 2018). She has also co-founded a cultural resource center and an Arabic children’s book line (Hikayat walad min Bayrut 2004) in Beirut.
Kirsten’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, L’École des hautes études en Sciences Sociales, and the Palestinian American Research Center, among others, and she was the Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow at the Clark Art Institute (2019-2020). Her writing has appeared in Aggregate, Anthropology Now, ArtMargins, International Journal for Middle East Studies, MERIP, Museum Anthropology, and Jadaliyya and is forthcoming as the book, Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950 with Indiana University Press, for which she received an image subvention from The Barakat Trust.
