Judith Scheele is a social anthropologist, who works in the Sahara. Scheele is based at the EHESS, France.

Career

Scheele obtained her DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford. From 2006-2009, she was a fellow by examination at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2009 she was the All Souls College Evans Pritchard lecturer. Also in 2009, Scheele was elected as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Scheele is Directrice d’études at the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She holds an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin.

In 2019 she gave the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at LSE in London.

In 2021-2022, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Selected publications

Monographs

Village Matters: Knowledge, Politics and Community in Kabylia (Algeria) (Oxford: James Currey, 2009).

Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

(with Julien Brachet) The Value of Disorder: Autonomy, Prosperity, and Plunder in the Chadian Sahara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara (New York: Basic Books, 2025).

Edited volumes

(ed. with James McDougall) Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).

(ed. with Fernanda Pirie) Legalism: Community and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

(ed. with Paul Dresch) Legalism: Rules and Categories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

(ed. with A. Shryock) The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology: Form, Duration, Difference. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019)

Articles