On Civilized Art in Primitive Places: Modern Art and the Formation of Lebanese Society
is an anthropologist and art historian specializing in modern and contemporary visual arts in Lebanon. She studied art history at Columbia University (1992) and cultural anthropology at Princeton University (2005). She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut and her research interests include the history of painting in Lebanon and the Arab world, colonialism and aesthetics, cross-cultural investments in fine art, and the use of art for negotiating ambiguous social identities such as gender and class. She is currently producing a manuscript, On Civilized Art in Primitive Places: Modern Art and the Formation of Lebanese Society. Her articles include The Agency of Art and Studying Arab Modernity (MIT-Electronical Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (7, Spring 2007), Missing Nike: On Oversights, Doubled Sights, and Universal Art Understood through Lebanon (Museum Anthropology, 32 / 2 Fall 2009), and The Necessity of the Nude: Being Painter, Man, and Intellectual in 1920s Beirut (International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, December 2009). Kirsten has also curated several exhibitions including on-line shows for Arteeast.org and at Nadi al-saha, a cultural facilities center she co-founded. In 1992–93 Scheid conducted independent field research on the contemporary Palestinian painting movement in the West Bank.
Scheid’s newest research has taken two parallel paths: funding of contemporary Arab art and audience cultivation, on the one side, and elite youth subjectivity formation, on the other.
