Claire Panetta

Professor Claire Panetta is an urban anthropologist who studies the contemporary Middle East. Her research explores the political dimensions of urban development and architectural heritage in Cairo, Egypt. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, City & Society, the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies, and the Routledge Handbook of Urban Design Research Methods. She is co-editor of Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (Terreform, 2016), a collection of essays that queried the sociospatial dimensions of the Arab uprisings. She is currently working on a book that analyzes urban transformations in Cairo after the January 25th Revolution of 2011. She completed her PhD in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and she holds an MA in anthropology from Columbia University and a BA in anthropology from Haverford College. She is a board member of the Critical Urban Anthropology Association, a section of the American Anthropological Association. At Barnard, Professor Panetta teaches Introduction to Urban Studies, Senior Seminar, Urban Ethnography of the Middle East, and Heritage and the City. She was the 2023 recipient of Barnard’s Emily Gregory Award for excellence in teaching.