Emilie Le Febvre is a Research Associate at McGill University, Head of Research and Arts at PLEDJ | Canada, and the co-founder of the Interactive Ethnography and Arts Initiative. She holds a DPhil and MSc in Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Le Febvre recently published her book, Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013: An Anthropological Approach, Special Series – Photography, History: History Photography (Routledge 2023).
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Emilie Le Febvre is an anthropologist and curator whose research documents the changing ways in which Bedouin and other tribal societies represent themselves and their histories in contested landscapes. Employing an interdisciplinary methodology, she draws on visual, digital and material culture, archives, storytelling, fieldwork, and multimodal encounters to examine local history‑making, representational practices, and land‑rights activism. Her Ethnography Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906‑2013: An Anthropological Approach presents a novel anthropological study of photography in the Naqab Desert, focusing on how Bedouin use photographs to make and respond to their own histories.
She is the co‑author of the forthcoming book Palestinian Activism in Israel: Intergenerational Bedouin Women’s Leadership in a Changing Naqab 1919–2023 (2026) and recently published the chapter “Reciprocating Place: Photo Archives and Bedouin in the Naqab Desert” in Photo Archives and the Place of Photography (2025).
She has received several awards for her research, including the Palestinian American Research Center Fellowship (2012), the Wenner‑Gren Fellowship (2013), and the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the Best PhD Thesis on a Middle Eastern Topic in the UK (2017). Over the next five years, her research agenda will continue to deepen understandings of how communities define and present their pasts and the politics embedded in these processes. She is currently working with Bedouin representatives in the Naqab and members of the Mohawk (Kanienʼkehá:ka) community in Kahnawake on projects in storytelling, digital ethnography, and history for knowledge mobilisation. Her anthropological scholarship is complemented by curatorial work focused on increasing public accessibility of academic research and the arts, and ensuring that heritage belongs to communities, memory‑keepers, and everyday individuals whose lived experiences imbue the past with voice. Le Febvre is co‑lead of the Global Social Justice and Peace Initiative at McGill University, Director of Research and Arts at PLEDJ | Canada, and co‑founder of the Interactive Ethnography and Arts Initiative. Previously, she held Postdoctoral and Research Associateships at the University of Oxford and was Director of Development at Achoti in Tel Aviv. She holds a DPhil and MSc from the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford and is an advocate for academics with disabilities, particularly those with dyslexia and auditory‑processing disorder.
