Sami Hermez

About

Sami Hermez, PhD, is director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar.  He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (UPenn 2017), which focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence, and My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford 2024), that tells the story of a Palestinian family resisting ongoing Israeli settler colonialism. His next project remains top secret and will only be explained for now should you meet him in person.

His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, the future, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab World. He has held posts as a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, University of Pittsburgh’s Visiting Professor of Contemporary International Issues, a visiting professor of anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.

Teaching

• ANTHRO 242: Introduction to Anthropology and the Middle East
• ANTHRO 242: Living the Law: Politics, Law, and Culture
• ANTHRO 379: Violence/Power/Resistance
• ANTHRO 379: Troubling Gender
• ANTHRO 379: Anthropology of Palestine
• INTERDIS 203: Ways of Knowing: Learning in the Postcolony

Research

• Violence
• Memory
• The State
• Critical Security Studies
• Time and Future studies
• Social movements
• Emotions

Publications

Books

Hermez, S. (2017). War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon.  U. of Pennsylvania Press.

Hermez, S. My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine. (Stanford 2024)

Articles and Chapters

Hermez, S. and Giulia El Dardiry. 2020. “Critical Security and Anthropology from the Middle East”. Cultural Anthropology 35 (2):197–203. (Curated peer reviewed collection of five articles and wrote introduction)

Hermez, S. (2019). “Dehumanization in War and Peace: Encounters with Lebanon’s Former Militia Fighters.” American Anthropologist, 121(3): 583-594.

Hermez, S., Samer Abboud, Omar S. Dahi, Waleed Hazbun, Nicole Sunday Grove, Coralie Pison Hindawi, & Jamil Mouawad (2018). “Towards a Beirut School of critical security studies.” Critical Studies on Security, 6(3): 273-295.

Hermez, S. (2015). “When the State is (N)ever Present: On Cynicism and Political Mobilization in Lebanon.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21. (Chosen for republication in JRAI Virtual Issue: Crossroads, 2021)

Hermez, S. (2015). “Ethnographies of Political Violence” In, Stewart, Pamela J and Andrew Strathern (eds.). Research Companion to Anthropology. Ashgate Publishing.

Hermez, S. (2012). “The War is Going to Ignite”: On the Anticipation of Violence in Lebanon. PoLar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 35(2): 326-343. (Republished in Open Anthropology: A Public Journal of the American Anthropological Association, 1(2), Nov 2013; Republished in PoLar Virtual Edition: Futures in Anthropology with new Postscript, 2016 as one of seven groundbreaking new works)

Hermez, S. (2011). On Dignity and Clientelism: Lebanon in the Context of the 2011 Arab Revolutions.  Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 11(3).

Hermez, S. (2011). Activism as ‘Part-time’: Searching for Commitment and Solidarity in Lebanon. Cultural Dynamics, 23(1). (Top 50 most read articles in journal as of Oct 2013)

Book Reviews

2019 “Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar.” PoLar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

2017 “The Insecure City: Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut.” Anthropological Quarterly, 90(3): 861-864.

2016 “Loyal unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia.” PoLar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

2014 “Discourses of War and Peace.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 24(3): 368-70.

2011 “War and Memory in Lebanon.”  American Ethnologist. 38(4): 821–822.

2009 “Hezbollah: A Short History.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 41(1): 148-149.

Select Other Publications

Hermez, S. (2020). “Heartbreak, Still Time, and Pressing Forward: On Lebanon and the Future.” Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) Studies. https://pomeps.org/heartbreak-still-time-and-pressing-forward-on-lebanon-and-the-future