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Rebecca L. Stein

Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
Box 90091, Durham, NC 27708-0091
205 Friedl Building, 1316 Campus Drive Duke Box 900, Durham, NC 27710

Selected Grants


American Israel in the shadow of the 2020 presidential campaign: An ethnography of branding "special relationship"

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by University of Toronto · 2024 - 2027

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Security Versus Privacy in the Monitoring of People in Urban Areas

Inst. Training Prgm or CMEPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2021 - 2023

ACLS Fellowship 2015-2016

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by American Council of Learned Societies · 2016 - 2017

New Media and the Israeli Military Occupation

Institutional SupportPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation · 2010 - 2012

Repossessions: The Social Life of Palestinian Things in Jewish-Israel

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation · 2006 - 2008

Fellowships, Gifts, and Supported Research


American Israel: An Ethnography of The Branding "Special Relationship" (Co-PI with Alejandro Paz) · 2020 Awarded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada
"Captured: How the Digital Camera Has Changed the Israeli Occupation" · 2016 - 2017 Awarded by: American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS Fellowship Program) · $45,000.00 This project investigates the impact of digital camera technologies on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. Based on ethnographic research with a range of Israeli institutional actors, from the military to the human rights community, it studies the degree to which new camera technologies and networked photo sharing practices are altering the ways that Israeli military rule is practiced, represented, documented, and prosecuted, and how the viral visibility of military rule is affecting how mainstream Jewish Israelis understand themselves as an occupying power. Through archival research, this project also tracks the history of the Israeli military’s relationship to photographic technologies as tools of control, surveillance, and documentation as well as the history of the mainstream Israeli media’s relationship to the visual archive of occupation. It explores the ways that new technologies, changing practices of seeing, and new visual fields are recalibrating the terms of Israeli sovereignty.
"Digital Occupation: Social Media and the Israeli Occupation" · 2011 - 2012 Awarded by: Wenner-Gren Foundation · $25,000.00
"Digital Occupation: Social Media and the Israeli Occupation" · 2011 - 2012 Awarded by: Palestinian American Research Council