EWIC: Online Editors
SUAD JOSEPH
Dr. Suad Joseph at University of California, Davis
EWIC General Editor
Suad Joseph is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. Her research has focused on her native Lebanon, on the politicization of religion, on women in local communities, on women, family and state, and on questions of self, citizenship, and rights. Her current research is a long-term longitudinal study on how children in a village of Lebanon learn their notions of rights, responsibilities and citizenship in the aftermath of the Civil War and on their transnational families who have moved to the United States and Canada.
She is Founding Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, UC Davis.
She is founder and facilitator of the Arab Families Working Group (AFWG), a group of 16 scholars undertaking comparative, interdisciplinary research on Arab families in Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the United States.
She is founder of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies (AMEWS) and co-founder of AMEW's Journal for Middle East Women's Studies (JMEWS) published by Indiana University Press.
She is founder and Director of the University of California Arab Region Consortium, which includes the American University of Beirut, the American University in Cairo, the Lebanese American University, Birzeit University, American University in Sharjah, and UC Davis. She served as the President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, 2010-2011.
She is General Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Her edited books include Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse, 2000), Intimate Selving in Arab Families (Syracuse, 1999), Women and Islamic Culture: Disciplinary Paradigms and Approaches 2003-2013 (Brill 2013), and Arab Family Studies: Critical Reviews (Syracuse 2018) Her co-edited books include: Building Citizenship in Lebanon (Lebanese American University, 1999); Women and Citizenship in Lebanon (1999), Women and Power in the Middle East (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and Muslim-Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political and Social Origins (Westview 1978). She has published over 100 articles, and won many awards and prizes including the UC Davis Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (2014, $45,000).
DR. NURHAIZATUL JAMIL
EWIC Online Editor
Nurhaizatul Jamil is an Assistant Professor in Global South Studies, and the co- director of the Social Media Lab at Pratt Institute. She received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Northwestern University. Her current book project focuses on Singaporean Muslim women's participation in Islamic classes that emphasize self-transformation. Her next research project examines the entanglements between modest fashion and sustainability within Muslim communities. At Pratt, she teaches classes on women in Muslim worlds, MENA communities and cultures, decolonizing methodologies, and fashion and sustainability studies. She also co-coordinates the Social Media Lab at Pratt. Dr. Jamil has received fellowships from the following granting agencies: Wenner Gren Foundation, Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education (Dissertation completion), Social Science Research Council (SSRC, declined). Her articles have been published in various peer-reviewed journals such as the Asian Studies Review, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, International Journal of Communication.
JEANETTE JOUILI, PHD
EWIC Online Editor
Jeanette S. Jouili is associate professor of Religion at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on Muslim communities in contemporary Europe where she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork for two decades. Her work examines the intersections between contemporary expressions of Islamic practice and secular governance, especially in a political context defined by the Global War on Terror. She has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals, is the author of Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford, 2015) and the co-editor of the volume “Embodying Black Religion in Africa and its Diasporas: Memory, Movement and Belonging through the Body,” (Duke 2021). Currently, she is working on her second book manuscript: Islam on Stage: British Muslim Culture in the Age of Counterterrorism.
Hafsa Kanjwal
EWIC Online Editor
Hafsa Kanjwal is an associate professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition. Colonizing Kashmir historicizes India’s occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. Her second book project examines questions of Muslim political sovereignty and the secular, liberal international order in the context of 20th and 21st century Kashmir.
Hafsa has written and spoken on her research for a variety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC. She received her Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan.
Dana M. Olwan
EWIC Online Editor
Dana M. Olwan is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. She is also affiliated faculty in the Middle East Studies Program, Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, and LGBT Studies Program at Syracuse University. Her work is located at the nexus of feminist theorizations of gender violence, transnational solidarities, and critical feminist pedagogies. She is the recipient of a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader Award from the Institute of Citizens and Scholars, a Future Minority Studies postdoctoral fellowship, and a Palestinian American Research Council grant. Her work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Formations, the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies, American Quarterly, and Feral Feminisms. She is co-editor with Margaret A. Pappano of Muslim Mothering: Local and Global Histories, Theories, and Practices (Demeter Press, 2016). Her first book Gender Violence and The Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime was published by Ohio State University Press in 2021. She is currently working on a new project that is centered on marriage and divorce laws and citizenship practices in the Arab world, with a specific focus on Jordan and women’s access to personal status rights. She is co-editor (with Chandra Talpade Mohanty) of Reimagining Comparative Feminist Studies book series from Palgrave Macmillan. She is also Associate Editor of the Americas for the Encyclopedia of Muslim Women and Cultures (published by Brill). She teaches courses on transnational feminism, feminist solidarity, and gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa.
ELORA SHEHABUDDIN
EWIC Online Editor
Elora Shehabuddin is Associate Professor of Humanities and Political Science at Rice University. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. She was Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, before moving to Rice. Professor Shehabuddin is the author of two books, Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2008) and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, 1992). She has published articles in Modern Asian Studies, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Journal of Women's History, Südasien-Chronik [South Asia Chronicle], Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and Asian Survey, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes. She is an Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Brill) and a guest co-editor of a special issue of Feminist Economics on "Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities." Her current book project is a history of Muslim women, feminism, and global politics.Professor Shehabuddin has received many fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. She has been selected as a Research Associate in the Women's Studies in Religion Program at the Divinity School at Harvard University and as a Carnegie Scholar. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association's Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award for best dissertation in Religion and Politics. Professor Shehabuddin currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School and on Final Selection Committee of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Women's Studies Fellowship.
ZEINA ZAATARI
The Arab American
Cultural Center, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)
EWIC Online Editor
Zeina Zaatari is the director of the Arab American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago in Chicago, IL. She is currently working on a book project titled: Interrogating Heteronormativity in Lebanon: Family, Citizenship, and Access to Adulthood. Previously, she worked as the Regional Director for the MENA Program at Global Fund for Women (2004-2012) where she managed a diverse grant making program to support women’s movements. She earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology with an emphasis in Feminist Theory from the University of California at Davis, with dissertation fieldwork focusing on women’s groups and activists in South Lebanon. She currently serves as Secretary of the Board of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development and is a core group member of the Arab Families Working Group. Her publications include an edited book Telling Our Stories: Women’s Voices of the Middle East and North Africa (2011), and chapters/articles including “Desirable Masculinity/Femininity and Nostalgia of the “Anti-Modernity”: Bab el-Hara Television Series as a Site of Production” in Sexuality and Culture(2014), “Re-Imagining Family, Gender, and Sexuality: Feminist and LGBT Activism in the context of the 2006 Invasion of Lebanon” co-written with Nadine Naber in Journal Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power (2014), “Arab Feminist Awakening: Possibilities and Necessities” in Arab Feminisms: A Critical Perspective (in Arabic 2012, English 2014), “In the Belly of the Beast: Struggling for Non-Violent Belonging” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms (2011), “Women’s Leadership in the MENA,” in Gender and Women’s Leadership (2010), “Production of Knowledge: International Development Agencies” in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures(2010), and “The Culture of Motherhood: An Avenue for Women’s Civil Participation” in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2006). Additionally, she has authored several commissioned research publications including: “Unpacking Gender: The Humanitarian Response to the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan” (2014, Women’s Refugee Commission), and “No Democracy Without Women’s Equality: Middle East and North Africa” (2013, Social Science Research Council, Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum).