Nadia Abu El-Haj is Co-Director, Center for Palestine Studies Center at Columbia University and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College. Her work straddles the disciplines of anthropology and history of science. Concerned most generally with the relationships among scientific practices, social imaginaries and political regimes, she has examined the work of specific historical sciences within the context of their own historical and disciplinary conditions of possibility. El-Haj received a BA from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Duke University. She is currently working on a book that is provisionally titled, The Ethics of Trauma: Moral Injury, Combat, and U.S. Empire, in which she examines the myriad forms and legacies of violence that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have unleashed. El-Haj's publications include, books, The Genealogical Science: Genetics, The Origins of the Jews, and The Politics of Epistemology (2012) and Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001); and articles “Bringing Politics Back In,” Public Books: Virtual Roundtable on Amy Waldman’s The Submission, March 12, 2012; “Racial Palestinianization and the Janus-Faced Nature of the Israeli State,” Patterns of Prejudice, 2010, Volume 44, Issue 1: 27 – 41; “The Genetic Reinscription of Race,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 2007, Vol. 36: 283-300; and “Edward Said and the Political Present,” American Ethnologist, 2005, Vol. 32, #4: 538- 555.