Lara Deeb, professor of anthropology at Scripps College in Claremont, California, is the winner of the 2014 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies. The award, which includes a cash price of 10,000 British pounds, has been given out by the British Society for Middle East Studies since 1998.
The award honors the book Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Morality and Geography in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013). Professor Deeb will share the award with her co-author Mona Harb, a professor at the American University of Beirut.
“Leisurely Islam is a superb book,” noted the prize’s official review. “It surpasses most studies of contemporary Middle Eastern cities with its sensitivity, its aliveness to theoretical exposition, with the coherence and fluidity of its writing, and with its extraordinary contribution not only to scholarship but to our general understanding – both political and social – of what leisure might mean in the context of a given neighborhood, what the politics of a neighborhood are, and how youth participate in both quotidian and high-level politics of their time.”
Professor Deeb is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Emory University in Atlanta.