Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

Get access Subject: Middle East And Islamic Studies
Edited by: Suad Joseph

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The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures Online is an interdisciplinary, trans-historical, and global project embracing women and Islamic cultures in every region where there have been significant Muslim populations. It aims to cover every topic for which there is significant research, examining these regions from the period just before the rise of Islam to the present. The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures Online crosses history, geographic borders and disciplines to create a groundbreaking reference work reflecting the very latest research on gender studies and the Islamic world.

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EWIC Online Editorial Board

  • General Editor
    • Suad Joseph, Ph.D., is Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Davis. Joseph founded the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology, which became the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association; the Association for Middle East Women's Studies; the Arab Families Working Group; UCDAR, a six-university consortium; and the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at UC Davis. She co-founded the Arab American Studies Association, the Association for Middle East Anthropology; the Women and Gender Studies Program, and the Feminist Research Institute at UC Davis. She was the president of the Middle East Studies Association. She was awarded the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Research; lifetime achievement awards by the Association for Middle East Women's Studies and the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association; and the Jere Bacharach Service Award from the Middle East Studies Association. She has edited or co-edited over a dozen books and published over 100 articles.

  • Associate Editors: Associate Editors work closely with the General Editor (Suad Joseph) to solicit and edit articles for EWIC and to develop approaches and frameworks for EWIC volumes or supplements.
    • Nurhaizatul Jamil , is an Assistant Professor in Global South Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Her current research foregrounds minoritized Muslims’ engagements with social media and popular culture, and their imbrications with transnational circuits of Islamic education and consumption. Her next research project examines the entanglements among modesty, fashion, and sustainability within Muslim communities. Her work has been funded by the following institutions/granting agencies: Harvard Divinity School (Women's Studies in Religion Program); ACLS/Henry Luce Foundation; Wenner-Gren Foundation (dissertation & post-PhD); Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education (Dissertation completion); Social Science Research Council (SSRC, declined). She is an Associate Editor (East and Southeast Asia) of the Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures, and a trainer for the Muslim Women in the Media program (ACLS/Henry Luce).
    • 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. Furthermore, her broader research and teaching interests include anthropology of religion, ethics, religious pluralism and secularism, popular culture, race, gender. She has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and is the author of Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford, 2015) and 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.
    • 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 teaches courses on transnational feminism, feminist solidarity, and gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa.
    • Elora Shehabuddin, is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies, University of California, Berkeley. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. She is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021), which was selected as 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association; 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 Meridians, Signs, Journal of Women's History, History of the Present, Economic & Political Weekly, Modern Asian Studies, Südasien-Chronik [South Asia Chronicle], Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and Asian Survey, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes. She was a guest co-editor of a special issue of Feminist Economics on “Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities.” She currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Bangladesh Studies and a new Cambridge University Press book series titled "Muslim South Asia." Professor Shehabuddin has received several fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the 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.
    • Zeina Zaatari, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arab American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is also adjunct faculty in Anthropology and Faculty Fellow in the Honors College at UIC. Her recent publications include two co-edited books: Routledge Handbook on Women of the Middle East co-edited with Suad Joseph (2023) and The Politics of Engaged Gender Research in the Arab Region: Feminist Fieldwork and Knowledge Production co-edited with Suad Joseph and Lena Meari (I.B.Tauris 2022). Among her other publications include: "Sarah Hegazy and the Struggle for Freedom," Middle East Report Online (2020), “Social Movements and Revolution” in A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, edited by Soraya Altorki (2015, Wiley-Blackwell), and “Desirable Masculinity/Femininity and Nostalgia of the “Anti-Modernity”: Bab el-Hara Television Series as a Site of Production” in Sexuality and Culture (2014). She is a trainer and mentor for The Muslim Women in the Media Training Institute supporting journalism graduate students and junior journalists in better coverage and representation of Muslim women and their issues. Zeina was elected as the Member at-Large to serve on the board of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies for 2022-2024. She is a co-founder and elected board member of the Women Human Rights Defenders-MENA Coalition. For more info, please visit ..

  • Guest Editors: Guest Editors serve for a specific supplement or volume. They work with the General Editor or an Associate Editor to solicit and edit articles for EWIC.
    • Supplement 14. Pauline Homsi Vinson, Ph.D., is adjunct professor of English at Diablo Valley College, California. Pauline's doctorate centered on English Renaissance drama and her current work focuses on gender, race, and representation in Arab American literature, cross-cultural portability, and cosmopolitanism. She has taught in the U.S., the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Pauline is co-founder and former secretary of the Arab American Studies Association and 2016 chair and co-founder of the Global Arab and Arab American Literature forum at the MLA. She has published encyclopedia entries, book chapters, and refereed articles on Arab women's autobiographies and Arab American literature. Her current project explores the subversive potential of storytelling in Arab American re-configurations of the 1001 Nights.

  • International Advisory Board
    • Marilyn Booth, University of Oxford
    • Bahar Davary, University of San Diego
    • Rosa De Jorio, University of North Florida
    • Hoda Elsadda, Cairo University
    • Nadia Fadil, University of Leuven
    • Virginia Hooker, The Australian National University
    • Alice Horner, Independent Scholar
    • Amira Jarmakani, Georgia State
    • Afsaneh Najmabidi, Harvard University
    • Shaheen Pasha, Penn State University
    • Julie Peteet, University of Louisville
    • Kathryn Robinson, The Australian National University
    • Therese Saliba, The Evergreen State College
    • Seteney Shami, Social Science Research Council
    • Jacqueline Siapno, University of Melbourne
    • Jane I. Smith, Hartford Seminary

Print EWIC Volumes I–VI were published between 2003–2007. EWIC Online launched in 2010. All articles from Print EWIC are published in EWIC Online. Articles from Print EWIC indicate the volume in which they were originally published with the label “Volume X”. The date of publication “first published online” for all articles in EWIC Online, however, is the date of upload to EWIC Online. For the date of original publication of Print EWIC articles, kindly refer to the publication date of each volume, found on http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ewic or http://www.brill.com/publications/encyclopedia-women-islamic-cultures.