Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Email: nhb2115@columbia.edu

Mediterranean societies; Tunisia & Italy; Transnational regions; Migration

Naor Ben-Yehoyada's work examines unauthorized migration, criminal justice, the aftermath of development, and transnational political imaginaries in the central and eastern Mediterranean. His monograph, The Mediterranean Incarnate: Transnational Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago Press, 2017), offers a historical anthropology of the recent re-emergence of the Mediterranean. He is specifically interested in the processes through which transnational regions form and dissipate. His current project follows perpetual debate about what the Mafia is and how anti-Mafia forms of inquiry (by magistrates, journalists, political activists, police investigators) encounter this dilemma.He argues that the epistemic tensions between magistrates and other actors turn the wider field of anti-Mafia inquiry into a key moving site of the struggle over the relationship between law, society, and the state.