Sherine Hafez is the current President of the Association of Middle East Women's Studies. She is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and has served as President of the Association of Middle East Anthropologists (AMEA). Hafez served as Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (JMEWS). Her research focuses on gender studies in Arab, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. Her current research has taken her to Sicily where she studies representations of Arabs and Muslims in Sicilian material culture and focuses on the figure of the Madonna Delle Milizie and her role in the confrontation between Arabs and Normans in Scicli.
Hafez is the author of several volumes including her most recent award- winning, Women of the Midan, The Untold Stories of Egypt's Revolutionaries (Indiana University Press, 2019) which discusses Egypt's revolutionary women and gendered corporeal resistance in the Middle East. An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion And Secularism In Women's Islamic Movements (New York University Press, 2011) which challenges binary representations of women's subjectivities in Islamic movements and, The Terms of Empowerment: Islamic Women Activists in Egypt (2003). She has co-edited, 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 studies in the Middle East and Muslim majority countries, Islamic movements, women's Islamic activism and in the uprisings in the Arab World.
