Ilana Feldman is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University.

Professor Feldman received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan in 2002. She has an MA in Near Eastern Studies from New York University and a BA from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. From 2004-07 she was Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow and Director of Graduate Studies for the Near Eastern Studies Program at NYU. Prior to that she was a Mellon Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Lecturer in Anthropology at Columbia University from 2002-04. Professor Feldman has done extensive ethnographic and archival research in Gaza and the West Bank, Cairo, London, as well in the United States.

She has published articles in a number of journals, including Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and History and Memory. She co-edited In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (2010 Duke University Press) with Miriam Ticktin, which brings together papers that consider this relation in the context of human rights and humanitarianism; biological technologies; and humans and nature. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule (1917-67) (Duke University Press, 2008). This book, an historical ethnography of the civil service in Gaza during the British Mandate and Egyptian Administration, examines how governing authority was produced and challenged and how the details of everyday rule shaped the people and place of Gaza.

Professor Feldman's current research includes work on policing and security and humanitarianism. In the first project she is examining the impact of policing practices on conceptions of citizenship in Gaza. In the second, she is tracing the Palestinian experience in humanitarianism in the years since 1948 in order to explore both how this dynamic has shaped Palestinian social and political life and how the Palestinian experience has influenced the broader post-war humanitarian regime.