MESA Book Awards
Lara Deeb
Scripps College
2025 Nikki Keddie Book Award Honorable Mention
Lara Deeb
Love Across Difference: Mixed Marriage in Lebanon
Stanford University Press
A beautifully written ethnography of “mixed couples” in Lebanon, Love Across Difference complicates the scholarship on sectarianism by highlighting the role of heterosexual marriage in the social reproduction of sectarianism as a significant marker of social difference in Lebanon. Offering the possibility of a future wherein sect is not assumed to be unchanging, the book’s stories show that the everyday practices of mixed couples have the potential to eventually empty sect of its social power.