Professor Martha Mundy

Professor Martha Mundy is a specialist in the anthropology of the Arab World whose research has concerned anthropology of law and the state, the comparative sociology of agrarian systems, and the anthropology of kinship and family. Her first major fieldwork was conducted from 1973-77 in North Yemen. Before joining the LSE in 1996 she taught at UCLA, Lyon 2 Lumière University, The American University of Beirut, and Yarmouk University in Jordan. During her ten years in Jordan (1982-92) she began a project of historical anthropology examining the transformation of political and economic relations in late Ottoman Southern Syria, present north Jordan. This combined work on law, on the state, and on village society and involved archival work in Istanbul and Damascus as well as research into oral history and administrative records in Jordan. Since her retirement in 2012, she has continued work on agrarian history and the contemporary crisis of agriculture in the Arab East.

Expertise

Arab societies; law, agrarian systems, sociology of Islam, historical anthropology, kinship