Julia Elyachar
Julia Elyachar is an award-winning author, anthropologist, and political economist.
She was trained in anthropology, economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. At Princeton, she is an associate professor of anthropology, and associate professor at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is a Faculty Researcher with the Dignity and Debt network and serves on the Executive Boards of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
New book: On the Semicivilized
Julia Elyachar
Julia Elyachar is an award-winning author, anthropologist, and political economist.
She was trained in anthropology, economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. At Princeton, she is an associate professor of anthropology, and associate professor at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is a Faculty Researcher with the Dignity and Debt network and serves on the Executive Boards of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
New book: On the Semicivilized
On the Semicivilized
Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo
On the Semicivilized
Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo
On the Semicivilized is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire.
Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized.
More books
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“Public Wealth, Public Enemies, and the Right to Existence: Thinking about Wealth with the Earl of Lauderdale in Cairo and Split.” Current Anthropology, Volume 66, August 2025.
“Relational Finance: Ottoman Debt, Financialization, and the Problem of the Semi-Civilized.” Journal of Cultural Economy 16, no. 3 (February 2023): 323–36.
“Anthropology of Proprioception: Endurance and Collectivity on Unstable Grounds in Post-Revolutionary Cairo.” American Anthropologist 124, no. 3 (September 2022): 525–35.
“Neoliberalism and the Savage Slot: Rationality, Irrationality, and Calculating Value 1920-2020.” In The Neoliberal Present? Political Economies in Flux, William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, editors. Fordham University Press, 2019, pp. 177-195.
“Upending Infrastructure in Times of Revolt.” In Distributed Agency, edited by Paul Kockelman and Nick Enfield (Oxford University Press, 2017), 49–56.
“Thinking Infrastructures: Introduction.” With Martin Kornberger, Neil Pollock, Geoffrey Bowker, and Joanne Nucho. In Thinking Infrastructures (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, vol. 62), co-edited with Martin Kornberger, Neil Pollock, Geoffrey Bowker, and Joanne Nucho (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2019).
About Professor Elyachar
Julia Elyachar is associate professor of anthropology at the Princeton University Department of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is the author of the books On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo and Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Her work draws on fine-grained ethnography and regional expertise in the Middle East, Levant, and the Maghreb to open up areas for theoretical inquiry and conceptional innovation in anthropology and the social sciences more broadly.
More about Professor Elyachar
About Professor Elyachar
Julia Elyachar is associate professor of anthropology at the Princeton University Department of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is the author of the books On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo and Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Her work draws on fine-grained ethnography and regional expertise in the Middle East, Levant, and the Maghreb to open up areas for theoretical inquiry and conceptional innovation in anthropology and the social sciences more broadly.
More about Professor Elyachar
Events
Sep
19
2025
Fatima Seck interviews Julia Elyachar
Conversations in Atlantic Theory, Journal of French and Francophone philosophy,
Interview
Online
Conversations in Atlantic Theory explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.
LinkSep
26
2025
Mikey Muhanna interviews Julia Elyachar
Afrika Podcast
Interview
Online
The afrika Podcast features experts from academia, art, media, urban planning, and beyond, who are helping document and shape the histories and cultures of the Arab world through work.
Link
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