About

Dr. Lilith Mahmud is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine, with a background that includes a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University. Her research interests encompass feminist ethnography; gender, race, nationalism, and migration; Blackness in Europe; secrecy, transparency, and conspiracy theories; elites, the Right, and neofascism; liberalism, humanism, and Occidentalism. She has authored the book 'The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters: Gender, Secrecy, and Fraternity in Italian Masonic Lodges,' an ethnographic study of white, elite, right-wing women involved in Italian Masonic Lodges, which was awarded the William A. Douglass Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. Her work critically examines liberalism as a cultural category in Europe, highlighting its ideological links with whiteness and far-right politics, and aims to develop a critical theory of Europe that disarms its antiblackness. She also advocates for an illiberal, partisan, and anti-fascist approach to anthropology, emphasizing methodological and theoretical tools for such an orientation. Currently, she is working on a book project analyzing Italy’s institutional responses to the Mediterranean migration crisis, combining ethnographic fieldwork, fictional storytelling, and personal accounts to challenge hegemonic narratives of Europe at its margins.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• History
• Anthropology
• Geography

Selected publications

• Afterword: An illiberal anthropology of difference

  Critique of Anthropology · 2025-11-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Afterword to the “Encounters of Difference” Special Issue, edited by Leslie Fesenmyer, Giulia Liberatore, and Ammara Maqsood.

  PublisherDOI

• PERFORMING INCOMPETENCE:

  Berghahn Books · 2024-06-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 1. Performing Incompetence: Race and Migration in Italy

  Berghahn Books · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Geography
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• I fratelli e i profani. La massoneria nello spazio pubblico

  Journal of Modern Italian Studies · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Feminism in the House of Anthropology

  Annual Review of Anthropology · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Anthropology
  • Sociology

  Although early feminist insights about reflexivity and fieldwork relations have become core tenets of anthropological theories, feminism itself has been marginalized in anthropology. This review examines feminist contributions to American cultural anthropology since the 1990s across four areas of scholarship: the anthropology of science and medicine, political anthropology, economic anthropology, and ethnography as writing and genre. Treating feminist anthropology as a traveling theory capable of addressing critical social problems beyond gender, this article aims not merely to recredit feminism in anthropology, but also to show its potential to transform anthropology into an antiracist, decolonial, and abolitionist project.

  PublisherDOI

• The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Susan Lepselter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 192 pp.

  American Ethnologist · 2018-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Review: Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France by Kenneth Loiselle

  Nova Religio The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions · 2016-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| August 01 2016 Review: Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France by Kenneth Loiselle Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France. By Kenneth Loiselle. Cornell University Press, 2014. 261 pages. $59.95 cloth; ebook available. Lilith Mahmud Lilith Mahmud University Of California, Irvine Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (2016) 20 (1): 143–145. https://doi.org/10.1525/novo.2016.20.1.143 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lilith Mahmud; Review: Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France by Kenneth Loiselle. Nova Religio 1 August 2016; 20 (1): 143–145. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/novo.2016.20.1.143 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNova Religio Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• The profane ethnographer:

  Pluto Press eBooks · 2014-10-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters

  2014-01-01 · 39 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “The world is a forest of symbols”: Italian Freemasonry and the practice of discretion

  American Ethnologist · 2012-05-01 · 27 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Members of Italian Masonic lodges, esoteric organizations widely perceived as secret societies, prefer to explain their elaborate practices of concealment and disclosure in terms of discretion. Through the aesthetics and epistemology of discretion, Freemasons view the world as a “forest of symbols” hidden in plain sight and awaiting interpretation. Taking “discretion” as both an ethnographic and analytic category, I ask how an anthropological study of discretion may reveal not only forms of cultural practice deemed secret but also the interpretive art of decoding that underlies the process of knowledge formation at the heart of Masonic communities of practice. [ discretion, secrecy, Freemasonry, Italy, secret societies, aesthetics, epistemology ]

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Silvia Posocco

  Birkbeck, University of London

  1 shared

• Noah Tamarkin

  1 shared

• Lindsay Smith

  Arizona State University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• William A. Douglass Prize by the Society for the Anthropolog…