Graduate Student, Oriental Studies
DPhil Candidate, Assistant Dean
St Antony's College, St Anne's College
About
I am a Doctoral Student at University of Oxford, St Antony's College. I am based at the Oriental Institute and St Antony's Middle East Centre and my postgraduate studies are made possible by Clarendon and ORS Awards. I have held the position of Assistant Dean at St Anne's College, University of Oxford since September 2008.
I am a social historian whose work focuses on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt and Syria. My doctorate focuses on the Dar al-'Ulum teacher's training college in interwar Egypt (which exists today as Cairo University's College of Dar al-'Ulum). I am using institutional records, journals and memoirs to write a social history of individuals involved with the school, placing it in a context of social, educational and religious change.
I am currently involved in co-organizing an upcoming conference, "Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority," which will be held at St Antony's College, University of Oxford on October 16 and 17, 2009.
An article version of my master's thesis won the 2007 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Graduate Article Prize in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and was published subsequently in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies in 2008. This thesis examined the religious authority of female mosque instuctors in contemporary Damascus and was based on a year of fieldwork as a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria. I studied Arabic during two summers at Middlebury College's Summer Language School for Arabic, my years of undergraduate study at Princeton University and my year-long Fulbright Fellowship.
My general research and teaching interests include modern Islamic thought and practice (in the twentieth-century Middle East and contemporary Europe), modern Middle Eastern history (especially social and intellectual history), and gender in Islam and the Middle East.
Contact Information
St Antony's College
Oxford
OX2 6JF
