J. Andrew Bush

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Primary Academic Program: Anthropology

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Middle Eastern Studies

Biography: Andrew Bush is an anthropologist interested in the intersection of religion, gender and sexuality, law, and poetry in the Middle East. He has conducted research in the Kurdistan region of Iraq since 2004, with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, and Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan (Stanford University Press, 2020), describes the kinds of ethical life available to Muslims who spurn devotional piety but retain intimate kin relations with other pious Muslims. His second book has been supported through a fieldwork grant from Wenner-Gren and a fellowship at Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. Tentatively titled A History of Husbands in Islamic Law, the book asks how questions of manhood or masculinity have been shaped by different legal forums adjudicating questions of marriage and divorce in Kurdistan since the 18th century. Other writing has been published in American Ethnologist, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East. He was previously a Research Fellow at Cracow University of Economics and taught for four years at New York University Abu Dhabi.

BA, James Madison University; MA, PhD, Johns Hopkins University. At Bard since 2022.
Website: https://www.jandrewbush.org
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