Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Clinton Bailey, Ph.D., is a world authority on Bedouin culture and history. Born and raised in the U.S., he has made Israel his home for over 50 years. Bailey has championed the cause of Bedouin rights in Israel for many years. In 1994, he was awarded the prestigious Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award, given annually by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Bailey received his B.A. degree in Islamic history and culture from Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1962) and his Ph.D. from Columbia University (1966), where he was the Honors Fellow of the Near and Middle East Institute. He has been the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Dorot Foundation, and the Alan Slifka Foundation.

Since 1991, Bailey has spent 13 semesters at Trinity College as a visiting professor, teaching many courses covering the Arab-Israeli conflict, political dynamics in the Middle East, minorities in the Middle East, traditional tribal law in the Middle East, and Bedouin culture. He has also taught at Columbia, Wesleyan, and Tel Aviv Universities.

In 1991, Oxford University Press published his highly acclaimed 20-year study, Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture. Recent books include A Culture of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs from Sinai and the Negev (Yale, 2004) and Bedouin Law in Sinai and the Negev (Yale, 2009). Bedouin Culture in the Bible will be published by Yale in 2016. He is presently writing a new book about tribalism in Middle East politics.