B.A., Michigan State Univ., James Madison College

Nehal Amer is a cultural anthropologist whose research examines urban political economy, speculative development, and the production of space in the Middle East. She previously served as the Marina Fernando Guest Lecturer in International and Global Studies at City College of New York. She received her M.A. in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where her dissertation explored speculation, real estate, and the urban political economy of Egypt’s new desert cities. 

Her research engages neoliberalism, inequality, housing, financialization, infrastructure, and securitization, as well as questions of crisis, temporality, and subjectivity. She is currently developing her dissertation into a book manuscript, Barren Speculation: Corporate Urbanization and Subjectivity in Egypt’s Desert Frontiers. Her teaching focuses on urban ethnography, political economy, development, urbanisms in the Global South, with particular expertise in the Middle East and North Africa.