Hanan Hammad
Professor and Director of Middle East Studies | Texas Christian University
Fort Worth, TX, UNITED STATES
Professor Hammad focuses on Middle Eastern history and Islamic civilization
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Biography
Professor Hammad is a social and cultural historian of modern Middle East. Her work focuses on gender, sexuality, working classes, and popular culture. Professor Hammad has authored many academic publications, most notably Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt from the UT Press 2016 and Unknown Past: Layla Murad, the Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt just out from Stanford University Press. Professor Hammad's research has won prizes from the National Women's Studies Association, the Association for Middle East Women's Studies, MESA, the Arab American Book Awards, and Journal of Social History.
Areas of Expertise (4)
Modern Middle Eastern History
Revolutionary Iran
Middle East
Women in Syria and Iraq
Accomplishments (5)
AddRan Distinguished Lecture
2018
AMEWS Book Award from the Association of Middle Eastern Studies
2017
Sara A. Whaley Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)
2017
Middle East Political Economy Book Award
2017
Giles-Sims Wise Woman Award 2014/2015
2015
Education (2)
University of Texas-Austin: Ph.D., History 2009
University of Texas-Austin: M.A., Middle East Studies 2004
Affiliations (2)
- Middle East Studies Association of North America
- The International Society for Iranian Studies
Links (1)
Media Appearances (2)
Industrial Sexuality: Historian Examines Egypt’s Transformation
TCU Magazine online
2018-09-23
Hanan Hammad, associate professor of history and director of Middle East Studies, provided gender-based insight into Egypt’s labor-driven transition in her book Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt (University of Texas Press, 2016).
Hanan Hammad Speaks on Iranian Protests
TCU News online
2022-09-30
Protests have broken out across Iran in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. She died while in custody after being arrested for “unsuitable attire” by Iran’s morality police. Hanan Hammad, professor and director of Middle East studies, spoke with NBC News regarding the protests of the Islamic dress code.
Event Appearances (2)
Egyptian History from the Edge and the State’s Archives
Keynote speech of the Surveying Modern Egypt Workshop, CUNY New York
2018-04-19
Researching for Hope and the Politics of Nostalgia: The Call for Egyptian Women
Keynote speech of the 18th Annual Southwest Conference in Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona Tucson
2018-03-22
Articles (7)
Daily Encounters That Make History: History from Below and Archival Collaboration
International Journal of Middle East Studies2021 What does a casual confrontation in a rundown shack between a landlady and her factory-worker tenant tell us about the history of gender and class relations in modern Egypt? Could a lost watch in a red-light district in the middle of the Nile Delta complicate our understanding of the history of sexuality and urbanization? Can an unexpectedly intimate embrace on a sleeping mat illuminate a link in the history of class, gender, and urbanization in modern Egypt?
In the Shadows of the Middle East’s Wars, Oil, and Peace: the Construction of Female Desires and Lesbianism in Middlebrow Egyptian Literature
Journal of Arabic Literature2019 This article employs the fictional writings of the Egyptian author Iḥsān ‘Abd al-Quddūs (1919–1990) to analyze the textually tangled anxiety over women’s sexuality and rapid political and socioeconomic changes in postcolonial Egypt and the Arab-East. Arguably one of the most prolific writers in Arabic in the twentieth century, ‘Abd al-Quddūs has achieved wide readership, and producers have adapted his books to popular commercial films and TV shows.
Disreputable by Definition: Respectability and Theft by Poor Women in Urban Interwar Egypt
Journal of Middle East Women's StudiesHanan Hammad
2017 Court records, police reports, and security statistics indicate that theft was the most frequent crime committed by imprisoned Egyptian women in the interwar period, although scholarship has largely focused on their involvement in prostitution. Theft by women was typically an isolated act motivated by urban conditions of poverty, but many women became skilled repeat offenders who worked individually or in teams, taking advantage of the growing transportation networks that linked villages, towns, and cities. The theft examined includes shoplifting, pickpocketing, burglary, laundry stealing, scams, and stealing from domestic employers...
Sexual Harassment in Egypt: An Old Plague in a New Revolutionary Order
Gender: Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und GesellschaftHanan Hammad
2017 The article aims at analyzing sexual harassment in Egypt in changing sociopolitical contexts at various times; I argue that no analysis of the Egyptian revolution is complete without an understanding of these broad sociopolitical conditions that have contributed to the culture of anti-women and sexual violence since the 19th century. I am not suggesting that sexual harassment always took the same form and was practiced with the same level of violence, or even rooted in the same reason(s) throughout that long period of history. Based on archival research, personal observations and intensive interviews with activists I show how sexual harassment increased in violence caused by the state's heavy-handed security and neoliberal policies.
Prostitution in Cairo
Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000sHanan Hammad, Francesca Biancani
2017
Arwa Salih's the Premature: Gendering the History of the Egyptian Left
Arab Studies JournalHanan Hammad
2016 This article examines the intellectual legacy of the Egyptian Marxist Arwa Salih (1953-97) in order to trace an intimate history of the Egyptian left. Gender relations among comrades have underpinned the movement that has enveloped women’s rights in the folds of national and class struggles. In her short life, Salih was a veteran underground activist and, from 1972-73, a key leader of the most effective student movement in modern Egypt...
Making and Breaking the Working Class: Worker Recruitment in the National Textile Industry in Interwar Egypt
International Review of Social HistoryHanan Hammad
2012 This article examines how worker mediation to secure jobs for relatives and co-villagers in the nationalist textile industry influenced working-class formation in interwar Egypt. Mediation was conducted out of a sense of communal commitment or for commission, or indeed both. The fact that rank-and-file workers were able to intervene in the recruitment process reveals that workers were successfully able to manoeuvre in such a way as to balance their unjust work relations with the huge mill and to manipulate its system...
Social