She is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City.

[6] Her research interests and work include urbanism, technology, memory, museum, archives, displacement, states, sovereignty, critical theory and genealogy.

[7] Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, while still a graduate student, Abu-Lughod spent time living with the Bedouin Awlad 'Ali tribe in Egypt.

[8] Her first two books, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society and Writing Women's Worlds, are based on this fieldwork.

[4] She explores the way that ghinnawas, songs in a poetic form that she compares to haiku and the blues, express the cultural "patterning" of the society, especially with regard to the relations between women and men.

[8] Abu-Lughod has described a reading group that she attended while teaching at Williams College – its other members included Catharine A. MacKinnon, Adrienne Rich, and Wendy Brown – as a formative engagement with the field of women's studies and a major influence on these early books.

In 1990, Abu-Lughod served as the Assistant Professor of Religion and Associated Faculty for the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Abu-Lughod spent time as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, with Judith Butler, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Donna Haraway.

She also taught at New York University, where she worked on a project, funded by a Ford Foundation grant, intended to promote a more international focus in women's studies.

Since then Abu- Lughod was very active in working on organising conferences and events that discuss gender and sexuality issues.

She deftly questions the motives of feminists who feel that Muslim women should be saved from the Taliban all the while injustices occur in their own countries.

In an interview with Mariam Syed for Columbia's Journal, Abu Lughod explains the history of resistance by Muslim women from Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Iran through scholarly writing.

She referenced the work of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Karen Engle, Rema Hammami and Saba Mahmood, who had all contributed to and pointed to sexual violence against women in times of war and conflicts.