Janet Abu-Lughod held graduate degrees from the
University of Chicago and
University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her teaching career began at the
University of Illinois, took her to the
American University in Cairo,
Smith College, and
Northwestern University, where she taught for twenty years and directed several urban studies programmes. In 1950-1952 Abu-Lughod was a director of research for the American Society of Planning Officials, in 1954-1957 – research associate at the
University of Pennsylvania, consultant and author for the
American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods.[5] In 1987 she accepted a professorship in sociology and historical studies at the Graduate Faculty of the
New School for Social Research, from which she retired as professor emerita in 1998.[6] Upon retirement she held visiting short-term teaching appointments at
Bosphorous University in
Istanbul and on the International Honors Program at the
University of Cairo.[5] She published over a hundred articles and thirteen books dealing with urban sociology, the history and dynamics of the World System, and Middle Eastern cities, including an urban history of
Cairo that is still considered one of the classic works on that city: Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious.
In 1976 she was awarded a John Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Sociology.[7] Abu-Lughod received over a dozen prestigious national government fellowships and grants to research in the areas of
demography,
urban sociology, urban planning, economic and social development, world systems, and
urbanization in the United States, the
Middle East and the Third World.[5]
She was especially well known for her monograph Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 wherein she argued that a pre-modern world system extending across Eurasia existed in the 13th century, prior to the formation of the modern world-system identified by
Immanuel Wallerstein. Among a variety of factors, Abu-Lughod emphasized the role of
Champagne fairs, the
Mongol Empire, the
Mamluk Sultanate, and the history of the
Indian subcontinent in shaping this previous world system. In addition, she argued that the "rise of the West," beginning with the intrusion of armed Portuguese ships into the relatively peaceful trade networks of the Indian Ocean in the 16th century, was not a result of features internal to Europe, but was made possible by a collapse in the previous world system.[8]
Abu-Lughod in her works approaches the social and economic development of global cities with the commitment to seeing and acting on possibilities for constructive social change. The span of her works goes from micro-level studies of territoriality and social change, to the analysis of the diffusion of global cities in the Western and Arab world, to historical studies of medieval cities.[5]
She published several well-received works on American cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities[9] and Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.[10]
Personal life
She was married in 1951–1991 to
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. They had four children;
Lila, Mariam, Deena, and Jawad.[11] Janet's family background is
Jewish.[12] She died aged 85 in New York City on December 14, 2013.[1]
^Ortner, Sherry B.New Jersey dreaming: capital, culture, and the class of '58, p. 3.
Duke University Press, 2003.
ISBN0-8223-3108-X. Accessed September 19, 2019. "The most famous graduate of Weequahic High School is Philip Roth, who has written with great ethnographic acumen about the school and the neighborhood in many of his novels (starting with the collection of short stories, Goodbye, Columbus), Other graduates of the school, well known in other circles, include the former basketball star and coach Alvin Attles, a highly placed economist in the Reagen Administration named Robert Ortner (no relation, as far as I know), Feminist philosopher Susan Bordo, and urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod (who also happens to be the mother of anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod)."
^"First Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture"(PDF). 2000-04-12. Archived from
the original(PDF) on 2009-08-15. Retrieved 2009-08-31. When I was still in high school, there were four books I read that left a life-shaping effect on everything I have since thought about cities. Two of those -- Technics and Civilization (first published in 1934), and The Culture of Cities (first published in 1938) -- were written by Lewis Mumford. They made an urbanist out of me, and I was not alone. Single-handedly, Mumford's writings placed cities on the agenda of ordinary Americans.
^
abcdCaves, R. W. (2004). Encyclopedia of the City. Routledge. p. 3.