Ghassan Hage


Ghassan J. Hage is a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Background

Hage grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, as part of a Maronite Catholic family. He moved to Sydney in 1976, aged 20. His maternal grandparents and mother had previously lived in, and were citizens of, Australia. Hage completed a Bachelor of Arts at Macquarie University in 1982, a Diplome de 3eme Cycle and a PhD in anthropology. From 1987-88 he was a part-time lecturer at UTS, then until 1994 a lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney. He was at the University of Sydney from 1994-2008 before moving to the University of Melbourne. He has also held a post-doctoral research position and a visiting professorship at Pierre Bourdieu’s research centre in Paris at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
He has held a number of visiting professorships including at the American University of Beirut, University of Nanterre – Paris X, the University of Copenhagen and Harvard.
He divides his time between Melbourne, Sydney and Paris, and is fluent in French, Arabic and English.
He suffers from deafness, possibly due to a bomb explosion in Beirut in his teenage years, and had one cochlear implant in 2004 and another in 2012.

Contributions

Hage works on the comparative anthropology of racism, nationalism and multiculturalism, particularly in Australia and the Middle East. He has written and conducted fieldwork on the Lebanese transnational diaspora in Australia, the US, Europe, Canada and Venezuela. He also researches and writes in social theory, particularly the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
He has been a high-profile contributor to debates on multiculturalism in Australia and has published widely on the topic. His most influential work is White Nation, which draws on theory from Whiteness studies, Jacques Lacan and Pierre Bourdieu to interpret ethnographic work undertaken in Australia. The book has been widely debated in Australia, with many of its themes picked up by anti-racism activists in other countries. The follow-up Against Paranoid Nationalism is an analysis of certain themes in Australian politics that became prominent under the government of John Howard.
He has also written on the political dimensions of critical anthropology. His most recent writing, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, is concerned with the intersection between racism and the ecological crisis.

Honours