• Professor, Anthropology
• Professor, Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies

• Ph.D. at University of Chicago

The research foci of students whom I assist include: Islam and politics, ecological adaptations among nomads and settlers in eastern Iran, and the implications of the introduction of formal education for Qashqa'i nomads. The graduate student who recently conducted research in Iran on formal education was funded by research grants from NSF, the Social Science Research Council, and Sigma Xi.

I am part of the Center for the Study Islamic Societies and Civilizations, a diverse group of people in many disciplines.

My courses include political anthropology, social change, Islam and politics, peoples and cultures of the Middle East, ethnicity and religion in the Muslim world, and the anthropology of gender. In my favorite course, writing culture, students do short-term ethnographic research projects in St. Louis and experiment with different ways of writing about their observations.

Courses

Islam and Politics, Political Anthropology, Social Change, Ethnicity & Religion in the Muslim World, Women and Islam, Writing Culture

Selected Publications

Beck, Lois and Nikki Keddie, eds.

1978 Women in the Muslim World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Beck,Lois

1986 The Qashqa'i of Iran. New Haven: Yale University Press.

1990 Tribes and the State in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Iran. In Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East. Philip Khoury and J. Kostiner, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1991 Nomad: A Year in the Life of a Qashqa'i Tribesman in Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press; London: I. B. Tauris.

1993 Rostam: Qashqa'i Rebel. In Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East. Edmund Burke, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1998 Use of Land by Nomadic Pastoralists in Iran, 1970-1998. In Bulletin of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies 103: 58-80.

2000 Local Histories: A Longitudinal Study of a Qashqa'i Subtribe in Iran. In Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron, eds. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Pp. 262-288.