Mandana Limbert

Mandana E. Limbert is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She serves as well on the executive committees of the Middle East and Middle East American Center and the Middle East Center’s MA program. She has also been a fellow and visiting scholar at The University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, New York University’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, The University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University’s Department of Cultural Anthropology, the Department of History at North Carolina State University and, most recently, a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the CUNY Advanced Research Collaborative.

As a cultural and historical anthropologist, Limbert’s work explores the everyday, lived tensions and inequalities of nation building in the Arabian Peninsula and across the Indian Ocean. In her ethnography, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Stanford University Press, 2010), she examined the ways people in an oasis town in the Sultanate of Oman experienced and contested a new political-economic order. She focused on projections of oil depletion, uncertainties about political futures, and the ethical debates and tensions about oil wealth and the infrastructure this wealth has enabled. In “Personal Memories, Revolutionary States and Indian Ocean Migrations” she turned her attention to the legacies of slavery and the Zanzibar revolution for nation building; in “Caste, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Arabness in Southern Arabia” Limbert considered changing conceptions of Arabness; and in her articles “Marriage, Status and the Politics of Nationality in Oman” and “Law, Marriage, and the Production of Place in Southern Arabia” she analyzed practices and laws about marriage, status, and identity. Her work has also explored links between history, nation building, and nature – oil, water, and, most recently, ophiolite mountains. Her co-edited volume Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and their Temporalities (School of American Research, 2008) examined the ways that the exploitation of nature and labor are entangled with official and personal accounts of the past and trajectories of economic progress. In “Liquid Oman: Oil, Water, and Causality in Southern Arabia” she explored nature and Omani historiography and in “Reserves, Secrecy, and the Science of Oil Prognostication in Southern Arabia,” she focused on uncertainties about proven reserves. With support from grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the City University of New York, and the National Endowment of the Humanities, Limbert has been writing her book, tentatively titled, “Oman, Zanzibar, and the Politics of Becoming Arab.”