Suad Joseph, Ph.D.

Dr. Joseph is an international leader in work on gender in the Middle East and has led numerous impactful collaborative projects. She has contributed to feminist academic institution-building as co-founder and founding chair of the board for the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute. She also led a large collaborative on Gendering STEM Education. 

Her early research investigated questions of ethnicity and state, local community organization and development, centering on her native Lebanon. This work led her to consider the impact of women on local and national politics and develop a long-term research program on the interface of gender, family and state in the Middle East. She founded the University of California Davis Arab Region Consortium (UCDAR) for 20 years and led Mapping the Production of Knowledge on Women and Gender in the Arab Region. She is General Editor of the prize-winning  Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. 

She has edited or co-edited 12 books, and published over 100 articles in journals and books. She has been a faculty at the University of California, Davis since 1976 where she is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Women's Studies. She is the founder and founding Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at UC Davis.  In 2014, she was awarded the UC Davis Prize – the largest undergraduate teaching and research prize in the United States. She was awarded the UC Davis Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship for 2020-2021. In 2024, she was awarded the Constantine Panunzio Award, a University of California systemwide award for scholars who have demonstrated distinction in research, teaching, and service post-retirement. She has also been awarded life time service awards from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, Middle East Studies Association of North America, and the Arab American Studies Association.