Lila Abu-Lughod is a Palestinian-American anthropologist. She is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. She specializes in ethnographic research in the Arab world, and her seven books cover topics including sentiment and poetry, nationalism and media, gender politics, and the politics of memory.

Born to Palestinian academic Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and American sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod in 1952, she obtained her PhD from Harvard University in 1984. She is an American with Palestinian and Jewish ancestry and is a professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York City.