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Hanan Hammad | Department of History

Hanan Hammad

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Professor
The Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History and Director of the AAEF Center of Arab Studies.
hhhammad@uh.edu 

Born and raised in Egypt, Hanan Hammad studied mass communication and journalism in Cairo University. After working as a journalist for several years, she moved to academia and received MA in Middle East Studies and Ph.D. in History and Persian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and 2009 respectively. She is a social and cultural historian whose work focuses on working classes, gender and sexuality, childhood, and popular culture in modern Arab World and the socio-cultural interaction between Arabs and Iranians in the twentieth century. Her research received support from Fulbright Hays, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany), Woolf Institute in Cambridge (UK), the Crown Center of Middle East Studies at Brandeis University among others. Her books and articles research received recognition and won prizes from the National Women's Studies Association, the Association for Middle East Women's Studies, MESA, the Arab American Book Awards, and the Journal of Social History among others. Before joining the 91ÁÔÆæ, Hammad was a professor at Texas Christian University where she founded and directed the Middle East Studied Program and chaired the Department of Women and Gender Studies.

Teaching

Professor Hammad teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Islamic History, modern Arab and Middle East history and culture, labor, gender and sexuality in global south.

Research

Professor Hammad’s current research projects deal with the Social History of Childhood in Modern Egypt and The Life and Death of Egyptian men in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

Publications

I. Books:

-Unknown Past: Layla Murad, The Jewish Muslim Star of Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022)

-Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt (Austin: University of Texas-Austin Press, 2016)

  • Winner, Sara A. Whaley Book Prize, National Women's Studies Association (NWSA)
  • Winner, AMEWS Book Award, Association of Middle Eastern Studies
  • Winner, Middle East Political Economy Book Award
  • Roger Owen Book Award, MESA (honorable mention)
  • The Arab American Non-Fiction Book Award (honorable mention)

II. Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

-“Begging, Stealing, and Striking: Labor Resistance and Survival in Interwar Egypt,” under review, International Journal of Middle East Studies.

-“Daily Encounters that Make History: History from Below and Archival Collaboration,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Volume 53: 1 (March 2021), 139-143.

-“In the Shadows of Middle East’s Wars, Oil, and Peace: The Construction of Female Desires and Lesbianism in Middlebrow Egyptian Literature,” Journal of Arabic Literature 50:2, (August 2019), 148–172. 

-“Disreputable by Definition: Respectability and Theft by Poor Women in Urban Interwar Egypt," Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 13:3 (November 2017), 376- 394. This article was also reprinted in Stephanie Cronin, Crime, Poverty and Survival in the Middle East and North Africa: The 'Dangerous Classes' since 1800, (I B Tauris, now Bloomsbury 2019)

-“Sexual Harassment in Egypt: The Old Plague in the New Revolutionary Order,” GENDER – Zeitschrift fĂŒr Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft 9:1 (summer 2017), pp. 44-63.

-“Arwa Salih’s The Premature: Gendering the History of the Egyptian Left,” Arab Studies JournalArab Studies Journal, spring 2016, pp. 118-142.

- “From Orientalism to Khomeinism: A century of Persian studies in Egypt,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 35, May 2015, 1-20.

-“Making and Breaking Working-Class Solidarity: Recruitment of Workers in the National Textile Industry in Interwar Egypt,” International Review of Social History, December 2012, pp. 73-96.

- “The Other Extremists: Marxist Feminism in Egypt, 1980-2000,” Journal of International Women's Studies, March 2011, pp. 217- 233.

- “Between Egyptian National Purity and Local Flexibility: Prostitution in al-Mahalla al-Kubra in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social History, March 2011, pp. 751- 783.

- “Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution in the Egyptian Press: From Fascination to Condemnation,” Radical History Review, September 2009, pp. 39- 57.

III. Peer-reviewed Book Chapters

-“Gendering the History of Representations of the Egyptian Left in Scholarship,” in The I.B. Tauris Handbook to Gendering the Cultural Histories of the Modern Arab World, eds. Hoda Elsadda and Seteney Shami (London: The I.B. Tauris Bloomsbury Publishing plc, forthcoming).

-“Gendering the History of the Labor Movement: Reconceptualizing Women’s Labor Activism in Egypt,” in Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History, eds. Beth Baron and Jeffrey Culang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 177-195.

-“Policing Women in Downtown Cairo: Students and Their Brothel Friends in Colonial Times” in Paul Amar (ed.) Cairo Securitized: Reconceiving Urban Justice and Social Resilience (Cairo and NYC: The American University in Cairo Press, 2024), 449- 461.

-“Disreputable by Definition: Respectability and Theft by Poor Women in Urban Interwar Egypt", reprinted in Stephanie Cronin Crime, Poverty and Survival in the Middle East and North Africa: The 'Dangerous Classes' since 1800, (I B Tauris, now Bloomsbury 2019).

-“Prostitution in Cairo,” with Francesca Biancani, in Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s, ed. Magaly Rodriguez Garcia, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Nederveen Meerkerk, Elise van [elise.vannederveenmeerkerk@wur.nl] Nederveen Meerkerk, Elise van [elise.vannederveenmeerkerk@wur.nl] (Leiden: BRILL, 2017), 233-260.

- “Gendered Obscenity: Women’s Tongues, Men’s Phalluses, and the State’s Fist in the Making of Urban Norm in Interwar Egypt,” in Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi (ed.), Urban Violence in the Middle East: Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire To Nation State (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 70-88.

-“Regulating Sexuality: The Colonial-National Struggle over Prostitution after the British Invasion of Egypt,” in Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman (ed.), The Long 1890s in Egypt: Colonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2014), 195- 221.

-“Relocating a common past and the making of East-centric modernity: Islamic and Secular nationalism(s) in Egypt and Iran” in Afshin Marashi and Kamran Aghaie (ed.), Rethinking Iranian Nationalism, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 275-294.

IV. Other Academic Publications

“Middle East and North Africa”, with Amina Zarrugh, in Women and Religion: Global Lives in Focus, ed. Susan Shaw (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2021), 115-146.

Selected the Best Reference Work in Religion & Philosophy of 2021 by the Library Journal.

-“Gender and Sexuality: Sources and Methods”, in Understanding and Teaching the Modern Middle East, ed. Omnia El Shakry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 271- 282.

“Sharaf Sun‘allah Ibrahim”, in The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, A Cengage Company, 2019), 1486-91. Won the 2020 Dartmouth Medal for most outstanding reference work from the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA).

V. Publications in Arabic and Arabic Translations from Persian (selected)

-“Ahl-e Gharaq,” a novel by Moniro Ravanipor, is under consideration by the National Project of Translation, Egypt.

-“Lower Class Language Reconsidered: From Outcast and Degraded to the Media and the Middle-Class Horizon,” Jadaliyya, July 13, 2013.  

-“Al Tariq al-Masdud” a poem by Ahmad Shamlu, in al-Qahira, May 2002, republished in Albedaiah, April 22, 2013