Omer Shah

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
With Pomona Since: 2022
  • Expertise

    Expertise

    Omer Shah is a cultural anthropologist. His research interests include religion and secularism, expertise and knowledge production, and surveillance and security.

    His current book project, Made in Mecca: Expertise, Technology, and Hospitality in the Post-Oil Holy City, examines recent efforts by the Saudi state to intensify and optimize Mecca鈥檚 pilgrimage through new sciences and technologies of crowd management, logistics and secular hospitality. His project demonstrates how these new forms of knowledge production operate in tension with older and decidedly more Islamic ways of knowing, managing and belonging in the holy city. Instead of approaching religious knowledge and secular knowledge as discrete spheres, Shah鈥檚 research explores their entanglements and aporias across a range of techno-political practices: navigation, hospitality, urban planning, systems thinking, crowd management, and optimization. Critically, his work argues that even in this moment of ritual intensity, the cosmopolitan logics of the holy city come to be blunted.

  • Work

    Work

    • 鈥淔rom Bilad al-Haramayn to Al-Quds: Rumor, Sovereignty, and Solidarity,鈥 in , edited by Mahdi Sabbagh, June 2024.
    • 鈥淏eyond Roborts: Artificial Intelligence in the Middle East: A Conversation with Nagla Rizk and Omer Shah,鈥 March 18, 2024.
    • 鈥淔rom Mecca to the World: Experimental Technopolitics and Islam in the Post-Oil Holy City,鈥 l, Volume 31, Issue 1/2, 2023.
    • 鈥7 Artifacts from the Smart City Being Built on the Back of the Ancient Sanctuary鈥 in , Issue No. 3, 2022.
    • 鈥,鈥 Logistics in the Time of Covid, 2021.
    • 鈥,鈥 The Derivative, Beirut Art Center, 2020.
    • 鈥溾 (Short Film), Jaffat Al-Aqlam, October 2020.
  • Education

    Education

    Ph.D., Anthropology, Columbia University

    M.A., Near Eastern Studies, New York University

    B.A., Anthropology, Bard College

  • Awards & Honors

    Awards & Honors

    National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2024

    Chau Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Anthropology, 麻豆影视 2022 - Present

    Early Career Fellowship, Columbia University 2021-2022

    SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship 2017-2018

    Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant 2017-2018

    SSRC Dissertation Proposal Writing Fellowship 2016

    The Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship 2013-2014

    The Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship 2012-2013

    The Franz Boas/ Ruth Benedict Prize for Senior Projects in Anthropology, Bard College 2007