Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science

Pick Hall 414
773 702 8065
On Leave 2020-21

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. She is also Associate Faculty in Anthropology and Co-Editor of the University of Chicago Book Series “Studies in Practices of Meaning.” Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). Among her articles are the following: “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004); “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009); “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010); “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013); and “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East” (2016). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. For Authoritarian Apprehensions, she received in 2020 the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award, sponsored by the Interpretative Methodologies and Methods group, and the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award. She is currently completing an edited volume with Joseph Masco entitled Conspiracy/Theory and beginning work on a  monograph about concepts, interpretation, and genre.

Selected Publications: