Joseph received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. She is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor at UC Davis. She founded the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology (the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association); the Association for Middle East Women's Studies; the Arab Families Research Group; and a six-university consortium (the American University of Beirut, the American University of Cairo, the Lebanese American University, Birzeit University, University of California, Davis, and the American University of Sharjah). She co-founded the Arab American Studies Association and the Association for Middle East Anthropology. She was the president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. She co-founded the Women and Gender Studies Program and founded the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at UC Davis. She was awarded the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Research, the largest such prize in the United States. She is General Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. She has edited or co-edited 8 books, and published OVER 100 articles in journals and books.
Dr. Joseph's research has focused on her native Lebanon. Her early work investigated the politicization of religious sects in Lebanon leading up to the civil war in 1975. That work led her to consider the impact of women's neighborhood and community networks on local and national politics. Joseph developed a long-term research program on the interface of gender, family and state in the Middle East, with a focus on Lebanon, and comparative work in Iraq. She developed culturally situated theories of "self", "rights", "citizenship" in the context of different political regimes and globalizing transnational networks. She is studying a cohort of children in a Lebanese village, focusing on how they learn their notions of rights, responsibilities, nationality, citizenship; how these notions come to be gendered; and how the notions are transferred from family arenas into political/public arenas – over a 20 year period. The project includes families have migrated to the US and Canada over the course of the study. She leads a project analyzing the representation of Arabs, Muslims, Arab American and Muslim Americans in major American print news media. She is co-director of a six-university project on sustainability and cities in the Middle East.
