Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Primary Academic Program: Anthropology

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Environmental and Urban Studies, Global and International Studies, Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies, Science, Technology, and Society

Biography:

Professor Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist whose research centers around infrastructure, discard studies, science and environment, climate change, colonialism and postcoloniality, austerity, the “sharing economy,” property, housing, the Middle East, and Europe. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, forthcoming), explores what happens when, as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and with those of their occupiers, waste is transformed from “matter out of place,” per prevailing anthropological wisdom, into matter with no place to go—or its own ecology. Her new book project investigates how Airbnb is transforming the relationship between subjectivity, real estate, and work in Greece as a way of understanding the world-making of austerity governance. Her other publications include pieces in the American Ethnologist; International Journal of Middle East Studies; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Arab Studies Journal; Jerusalem Quarterly; Anthropology News; New Centennial Review; and the Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper Series at the University of Oxford. Her film Waste Underground (with videographer Ali al-Deek) premiered at the Sharjah Biennial in Ramallah in 2017. She has presented her work at invited sessions of the American Anthropological Association, Middle East Studies Association, American Ethnological Society, Association of American Geographers, Modern Greek Studies Association, and at several American universities as well as a number of venues in Palestine. Her research has been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Columbia University, and Palestinian American Research Council.

BA, magna cum laude, anthropology and human rights, Columbia University; Msc, forced migration, University of Oxford; PhD, anthropology, Columbia University. At Bard since 2013.

Highlights:

2018 — Publication
"An Uncertain Climate in Risky Times: How Occupation became like the Rain in Post-Oslo Palestine," special issue on the environment in the Middle East and North Africa in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Volume 50, Special Issue 3, August 2018
Website: https://www.academia.edu/37391531/Sophia_Stamatopoulou-Robbins_AN_UNCERTAIN_CLIMATE_IN_RISKY_TIMES_H

2018 — Publication
Review of Space and Mobility in Palestine by Julie Peteet (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), in American Ethnologist, Volume 45, Issue 3, August 2018
Website: https://www.academia.edu/38059218/Book_Review_Space_and_Mobility_in_Palestine_by_Julie_Peteet._Bloom

2018 — Publication
Review of Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power by Joanne Randa Nucho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), in Arab Studies Journal, Volume 16, No. 1, Spring 2018
Website: http://www.arabstudiesjournal.org/261-spring-2018.html

2014 — Publication
“Occupational Hazards,” special issue on comparative infrastructure in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 34, No. 3, 2014: 476–496
Website: https://www.academia.edu/10019047/Occupational_Hazards

Contact:

Phone: 845-758-7201
E-mail:
Location: Hopson
Office: 304