Hsain Ilahiane

Hsain Ilahiane (Ph.D., University of Arizona) is an applied cultural anthropologist and professor at the School of Middle Eastern & North African Studies and the W.A. Franke Honors College. Prior to joining the University of Arizona, he served as professor and head of the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University (2018-2023); as associate professor of applied anthropology at the University of Kentucky (2009-2018); as senior social scientist at Intel Corporation Research Labs in Oregon (2006-2007); and as assistant and associate professor of anthropology at Iowa State University (1999-2009).

Ilahiane’s expertise is in applied and business anthropology and his research interests are economic development; poverty; globalization; information and communication technologies for development; arid lands ecology; oasis agriculture and irrigation systems; informal economies; economic anthropology; political ecology; Islam and the Middle East; and Africa. He is the author of Ethnicities, Community Making, and Agrarian Change: The Political Ecology of a Moroccan Oasis (2004), Historical Dictionary of the Berbers (Imazighen) (2017), and The Mobile Phone Revolution in Morocco: Cultural and Economic Transformations (2022).