Janet Abu-Lughod

Janet L. Abu-Lughod, née Lippman (born 1928) is an American sociologist with major contributions to World-systems theory and Urban sociology.

She was married in 1951 to Ibrahim Abu-Lughod; the marriage ended in a 1991 divorce.

Janet Abu-Lughod holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and University of Massachusetts. Her teaching career began at the University of Illinois, took her to the American University in Cairo, Smith College, and Northwestern University, where she taught for twenty years and directed several urban studies programmes. In 1987 she accepted a professorship in sociology and historical studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, from which she retired as professor emerita in I998. She has published over a hundred articles and thirteen books dealing with urban sociology, the history and dynamics of the World System, and Middle Eastern cities, including an urban history of Cairo that is still considered one of the classic works on that city: Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton University Press, 1971).

She is especially famous for her monograph Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) where she argues that a pre-modern World System extensive across Eurasia existed in the 13th Century prior to the formation of the modern world-system identified by Wallerstein. She contends that the Mongol Empire played an important role in stitching together the Chinese, Indian, Muslim and European regions in the 13th century, before the rise of the modern world system.

More recently, she had published several well received works on American cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities(University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles(Oxford University Press, 2007).