Leila Tayeb

Humanities Research Fellow

Education: BA, UC Santa Cruz; MA, The New School; MA, NYU; PhD, Northwestern University

Research Areas: sound and militarism, political authority in daily life, indigeneity and race in/and northern Africa, Islam and the state, state-sponsored performance, dance studies

About Leila

Leila Tayeb is a performance studies scholar focused on contemporary Libya. Her interdisciplinary research uses performance ethnography and unconventional archives to explore the politics of cultural performance and the performativity of political life.

After completing her doctoral training at Northwestern University in 2018, Tayeb spent two years as Stanford Taylor Postdoctoral Associate in Music and Islam in the Contemporary World at Cornell University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the intersection of Islamic studies, music, and performance studies. She is a founding member of the editorial collective of Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies, an open-source academic journal that centers methods and frameworks hitherto underutilized in the extant scholarship on Libya.

At NYUAD, Tayeb will be preparing her first book. Under the working title, Producing Authority in Post-Gaddafi Libya: Sound, Space, and Performativity, it explores how sound practices in Libyan daily life became sites of political contestation between militias and civilians during the years after 2011.

Publications

Journals

Tayeb, Leila. "To Follow Bousaadiya: Mobility and Memory in Libyan Cultural Politics." Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 16, no. 3 (2023): 313-336.

Benkato, Adam, Leila Tayeb and Zmina Zarrugh, eds. Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies 2 (2023).

Tayeb, Leila. “Roundtable: Methods and Sources for a New Generation of Libyan Studies.” Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies 2 (2023).

Tayeb, Leila. “Knowing Libya: Ethnography.” Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies 2 (2023).

Tayeb, Leila. “What is Whiteness in North Africa?” Lateral 10, no. 1 (Spring 2021).

Tayeb, Leila. "Militia Soundscapes in Post-Qaddafi Libya." Arab Studies Journal 28, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 64-83.

Tayeb, Leila. “Our Star: Amazigh Music and the Production of Intimacy in 2011 Libya.” The Journal of North African Studies 23, no. 5 (2018): 834-850.

Tayeb, Leila. “Shahi al-Huriya: Militant Optimism and Freedom Tea.” Communication and the Public 2, no. 2 (2017): 164-176.

Book Chapters

Tayeb, Leila. Digital Intimacy and Violence in Contemporary Libya.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Media and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa, eds. Loubna H. Skalli and Nahed Eltantawy. Springer International Publishing, 2023.

Encyclopedia Entries

Tayeb, Leila. “Libya: Modern and Contemporary Performance Practice.” The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, ed. Janet Sturman, 1340-1341. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2019.

Reviews and Interviews

Tayeb Leila. “Bouchra Ouizguen’s Corbeaux: A Horde of Crows, Disparate and Together.” Walker Magazine (September 2017).

Tayeb, Leila. “Review: The Ma’lūf in Contemporary Libya: An Arab Andalusian Musical Tradition by Philip Ciantar.” Ethnomusicology Review 19 (2014).

Tayeb, Leila. “Libya’s Dania Ben Sassi: On Language, Feminism, and Freedom.” Kalimat 5 (2012): 78-79.