Kirsten Scheid is an associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at American University of Beirut. She earned her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University and her BA in Art History from Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests are the Anthropology of Art, Aesthetics, Art Historiography and Theory, Modernization and Cosmopolitanism, Affect, and Elites. She has conducted field and archival research since 1992 in Lebanon and Palestine. In 2009, Kirsten was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, with its research program, “Europe in the Middle East, the Middle East in Europe.” Her research has been supported by the Palestinian American Research Center, the Barakat Trust, and the Issam Fares Institute. Kirsten has also contributed extensively to the art community, curating, exhibiting, writing in art journals and popular media, and founding both a cultural resource center and an Arabic children’s books line.