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Faculty » Susan Ossman

Professor
Ph.D. 1991 University of California Berkeley

Office: 1303 Watkins Hall
Phone: (951) 827-1264
E-mail: susan.ossman@ucr.edu

Susan Ossman’s research interests include media, migration, aesthetics and politics. She has developed innovative through modes of comparative and multi-site research to explore how media shape urban space and rework social and political boundaries in and around North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. She is currently involved in three major projects:

Paths of Serial Migration: in her upcoming book published by Stanford university Press in 2012, Susan presents the results of ten years of research on emerging forms of transnational social life and political engagement from the perspective of serial migrants, people who have lived in several countries. Paying attention to who can gain access to distinct social, ethical and aesthetic worlds leads to theorizing social distinction and cultural differences in ways that take into account how who we are is related to how we move.

Art and Anthrpology: The Fabric of Fieldwork : a duet exhibition by WESSIELING and Susan Ossman
“The Fabric of Fieldwork” joins field-artworks and fieldnotes from East Asia (Ling) and the Middle East (Ossman). Paintings, installations and texts remind us that women’s work is often heavy and relentless while conceptions of femininity often focus on cloth as the ethereal, light and effervescent together. The exhibit acts as a “place maker” to bring together a Chinese shop and a Moroccan kitchen, displacing the usual preeminence of regional markers in mapping the field. The gallery becomes a space not simply to report one’s findings or a place where regions met, but a kind of neutral ground where discourses about gender that have become habitual can be reanimated. The gallery becomes field site for the seminar that will join anthropologists, artists, dramatists and writers.
Opening: April 12, 2012: Seminar: April 14, 2012

Modernity, Media and the Social Basis of Tunisia’s Civil Revolution
The revolt against Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime was extraordinary because of its rapidity and relative civility. Many analysts focus their attention on political mobilization through social media networks or the crisis in youth unemployment, but I suggest that one needs to take a longer view and understand the revolution and its aftermath as shaped by the progressive modernization of the country since nineteenth century. Drawing on two decades of research in North Africa as well as data gathered since January 2011, I argue that the revolution was long prepared in social venues like cafes, stadiums, beauty salons, classrooms and theaters. Professor Ossman is writing a book based on this research with Professor Nabiha Jerad of the University of Tunis.

Susan’s publications include The Places We Share, Migration, Subjectivity and Global Mobility (Lexington 2007), Three Faces of Beauty, Casablanca, Paris, Cairo (Duke 2002), Miroirs Maghrébins, Itinéaires de soi et Paysages de Rencontre (CNRS 1998), Mimesis: imiter, représenter, circuler, (Hermès, CNRS,1998) and Picturing Casablanca, Portraits of Power in a Modern City (California 1994). She is the Director of UCR's Global Studies program and the chair of Interdisciplinary Programs. She previously taught at Goldsmith's College, University of London, Georgetown University, Rice University, The American University of Paris and the CELSA-Sorbonne. In 1992 she founded the Rabat center of the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC- now Centre Jacques Berque) where she was research fellow and director from until 1996.

Books

Recent articles and interviews