Associate Professor of Anthropology
Dr. Arkin is a cultural anthropologist broadly interested in the production and contestation of national, religious, racial, and gendered identities in France and Western Europe more generally. Her first book, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France, explores the racialization of Jewishness among second and third generation North African Jewish adolescents, arguing that it is both a mode of asserting relative Frenchness and a major barrier to feeling “at home” in France. She is beginning a new project on the (in)commensuration of Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim bodies and practices in in contemporary France. Entitled Wigs, Headscarves, and Habits: (in)commensurating religious bodies and producing “secular” France. This project will explore the construction of French national identity by looking at its supposed margins—the religious organizations and groups hard at work configuring the boundaries between themselves and an imagined “French public.”