Professor Lila Abu-Lughod of the Department of Anthropology and Professor John Ma of the Department of Classics have been elected Fellows of the British Academy. Established in 1902 and comprising more than 1,800 scholars from around the world, the British Academy is the United Kingdom’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.
“I am delighted to welcome our newest Fellows to the British Academy,” noted Professor Susan J. Smith, President of the Academy, in an announcement last Friday. “Each has made an outstanding contribution to their field, and together they reflect the remarkable breadth and depth of scholarship across our disciplines.”
Professor Abu-Lughod, the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, is a scholar of anthropology of the Arab world; gender and cultural forms; the politics and ethics of fieldwork, knowledge production, and representations; violence and memory in Palestine; and the geopolitics of feminism. A member of the Columbia community since 2000, she has been a recipient of the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, among other accolades, and previously served as Director of the Middle East Institute. She is jointly appointed in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender.
Professor Ma’s research focuses on the history of the ancient Greek world, the Greek polis as a political and social form, and the Hellenistic on a global scale. His most recent book, Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity, was published in 2024 by Princeton University Press. Professor Ma joined the Columbia community in 2015 and served as Chair of the Department of Classics from 2018 to 2021 and 2022 to 2025. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2025.
“We are thrilled that Lila’s and John’s impactful scholarship has been recognized by the British Academy,” noted Amy E. Hungerford, Dean and Executive Vice President of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “It is yet another reminder of the central role the humanities and social sciences play in expanding our understanding of the world, and the many ways Arts and Sciences faculty are contributing to that essential work.”
A third Columbia faculty member – Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor Law at Columbia Law School – was also elected to the 2026 class of Fellows.
Read more at The British Academy.
