Lilith Mahmud is a social anthropologist. She has pursued work on feminist ethnography, European studies and critical theory. Her first book, The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters (University of Chicago Press, 2014), was awarded the William A. Douglass Prize for best ethnography of the year by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. Mahmud spent 18 months living among elite women Freemasons in Italy where she compared how power is thought of and how power actually works in the secret fraternal society. She’s currently focusing her research efforts on the intertwined crises of labor and immigration in Italy. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the UCI Council on Research, Computing and Libraries and published in notable peer-reviewed journals, including American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, and Cultural Anthropology, as well as in edited volumes published by Pluto Press and Bloomsbury Press.