Dr. Sabra J. Webber, Academic Director/Program Coordinator
Dr. Sabra J. Webber is an associate professor and interim chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, which – with over 55,000 students – is the largest single university campus in the United States. Webber is an anthropologist and folklorist (B. A., Occidental College, M.A., University of California, Berkeley, and Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin) with a focus on North Africa, and especially Tunisia, where she has spent many years. She first lived there for three years as a Peace Corps volunteer starting in 1967. Her work on Tunisia and North Africa has been supported over the years by Fulbright, Rockefeller, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council and other fellowships, including a current fellowship from the American Institute of Maghribi Studies. Her publications pertaining to Tunisia include a children’s book in Tunisian Arabic, Lisagharina (“For Our Children”), and Romancing the Real: Folklore and Ethnographic Representation in North Africa, as well as an edited volume, Fantasy or Ethnography: Irony and Collusion in Subaltern Representation, and numerous articles.