My research is concerned most generally with the relationship between scientific knowledge and the making of social imaginations and political orders. I have sought to specify the ways in which particular historical sciences generate facts and to understand how those facts circulate in wider social worlds, helping to fashion the cultural understandings, political possibilities and “common-sense” assumptions that have been central to making of particular colonial regimes, national cultures and diasporic identities.

My current research analyzes the field of genetic anthropology by focusing first, on research projects that seek to reconstruct the origins and migrations of specific population groups and second, for-profit companies that offer “genetic ancestry testing” (to various “populations”). Most generally, I am interested in the conceptions of race, diaspora and kinship that this work makes possible, the refiguration of nature—and of its relationship to culture—that it entails, and the political demands for “recognition” or “redress” that are made on its evidentiary terrain.

Select Publications:

“Edward Said and the Political Present,” American Ethnologist, 32, 4, November 2004: 538-555.

Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Annual Book Award, 2002

“Reflections on Archaeology and Settler-Nationhood,” Radical History Review, 2002, 86: 149-164.