A public presentation featuring Nadia Abu El-Haj (Anthropology, Columbia College, Columbia University), “On Combat and Moral Transgression: emerging psychiatric theories of injury, ethics, and responsibility” and Jennifer Terry (Women’s Studies, University of California, Irvine), “Attachments to War: militarization and the production of biomedical knowledge in modern America."

Nadia Abu El-Haj is professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia.  Abu El-Haj is the author of two books, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), which won the Albert Hournani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, and The Genealogical Science:  The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012.  Abu El-Haj is now working on the field of military psychiatry, exploring the complex ethical and political implications of shifting psychiatric and public understandings of the trauma of soldiers. Provisionally titled, The Ethics of Trauma: Moral Injury, Combat, and U.S. Empire, this book examines the myriad forms and legacies of violence that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have unleashed, and how it is that so many of its attendant horrors remain hidden in plain sight.

Jennifer Terry is an associate professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California at Irvine. Her books include An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and two co-edited anthologies, Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 1995) and Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (Routledge, 1997). She has written articles on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science, contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals, love of objects, signature injuries of war, and the relationship between war-making practices and entertainment. Her current project is titled Attachments to War: Violence and the Production of Biomedical Knowledge in 21st-Century America.