Sherine Hafez is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) from 2018 to 2019 and served as President for the Association of Middle East Anthropologists (AMEA). Hafez’s research focuses on Islamic movements and gender studies in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures. Her new book in press (Indiana University Press) discusses Egypt’s revolutionary women and gendered corporeal resistance in the Middle East.
Hafez is the author of The Terms of Empowerment: Islamic Women Activists in Egypt (2003), which questioned the applicability of empowerment as defined by western liberal discourse to Islamic women’s activism. Her second book, An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion And Secularism In Women’s Islamic Movements (New York University Press, 2011), challenges binary conceptions of women’s subjectivities in Islamic movements by relating the interplay between the complex debates of modernity and postcoloniality to the particular historicity of Islam and secularism. She also co-edited the volume entitled, Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium, (Indiana University Press, 2013). Her articles have appeared in American Ethnologist; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Feminist Review; Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and Journal of North African Studies. Hafez lectures on gender, subjectivity, and revolution in the Muslim World and Middle East, Islamic movements, women’s Islamic activism and in the uprisings in the Arab World.