Brent Eng

Brent Eng joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. He is interested in questions about secularism and religion, political violence, and poetics, with a regional focus on the Middle East.  

Eng received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. He was previously a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UC Davis.

Along with his PhD, Eng was part of the Stevens Scholars program at Berkeley, conducting research on the epistemological apparatus and political economy subtending agriculture in Lebanon, with an emphasis on the linkages that tie them to the formation of the post-colonial state in the region.

Eng is currently writing a book called The Work of Bread in Times of War, an ethnography of Syrian bakery workers in Tripoli, Lebanon that stages the material work of breadmaking as at once a scene of political and psychic struggle.