The Near East Foundation would like to welcome its newest NEF UK board member, Dr. Linda L. Layne. In addition to her role on NEF UK’s board, Dr. Layne is a Director of Studies for Social Anthropology and Bye-Fellow at Girton College, an Affiliated Faculty Member, Social Anthropology, and a Research Fellow, Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc), at the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Layne’s first book was on tribal and national identities in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Princeton University Press 1994, to be reissued in 2019), after which she went on to write Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America (Routledge 2003). In Motherhood, she explored how reproductive technologies have changed the experience of pregnancy and pregnancy loss. She developed a women’s health approach to child-bearing loss through an 11-part, award-winning television series. Dr. Layne has edited numerous books starting with a volume on Elections in the Middle East, and perhaps ending with her most recent volume, Selfish/Selfless: Innovative Approaches to Understanding Morality (Berghahn, in press).

She is currently working on an in-depth case study that explores neoliberal cultures of parenting; and on a book which compares the experience of single mothers by choice, two-mom families, two-dad families, and families that suffered a pregnancy loss. Dr. Layne is a graduate of the University of Southern California, Cambridge, and Princeton.