Contributors
- Contributors
Sunny Daly recently completed dual M.A. degrees at the American University in Cairo, where she worked with Dr. Martina Rieker in the Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women's Studies, and Dr. Ibrahim Elnur in Political Science. Her article is adapted from her Gender Studies thesis, "Authenticity, Anxiety, and the NGO as Activist Tool." Since graduation, she has joined the Ms. Foundation for Women in New York City as Foundation Relations Manager, focusing on writing grant proposals for the organization's reproductive and sexual health work. Previously, she worked for the National Council for Research on Women and supported youth participation efforts at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). A graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, she has written and published on reproductive justice issues and is an active volunteer with NARAL ProChoice New York.
Trained in anthropology, John Tofik Karam is Assistant Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at DePaul University. He specializes in the historical ethnography of Arab cultural practices, social networks, and intellectual exchanges in the Americas. His book, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (2007), won awards from the Arab American National Museum and the Brazilian Studies Association. His work has also appeared in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review and Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, as well as in Arabs in the Americas (ed. Darcy Zabel, 2006). His current research asks how Arab diasporic ties in the so-called "tri-border" region of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina have crossed and maintained US–South American geopolitical boundaries from the authoritarian past to the counterterrorist present. Another [End Page 133] project looks at the twentieth-century history of Arab intellectual exchange between Brazil and the United States.
Sophia Pandya is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Long Beach. A Fulbright scholar, she wrote her dissertation on Sunni and Shi'i Bahraini women and the ways in which globalization and modern education have impacted their religious beliefs and activities. In her article, "Women's Religious Practices in Bahrain" (MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, 2004), she explored the ways in which Sunni Bahraini women gain agency through their participation at a Qur'anic school, and the role this school plays in their lives. Dr. Pandya also published an article on young, working Yemeni women and the intersection of their religious choices with transnational televangelism (JMEWS 5 [2009]: 1). She specializes in women and Islam, and more broadly in women, religion, and globalization. Having spent four summers in Sana'a, her current research focuses on religious change among younger and older generations of women in Yemen, and how they negotiate self-interest and conflicting religious discourses.
Stacey Philbrick Yadav is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She is currently completing a book manuscript comparing the discursive and institutional transformations brought about by interactions between Islamists and their non-Islamist interlocutors in Lebanon and Yemen. Yadav conducted the principal research for this project in Beirut, Sana'a, and Cairo in 2003–06, returning for follow-up research in 2008 and 2009. Her forthcoming article, "Understanding 'What Islamists Want'" (Middle East Journal 64 [2010]), details the contractive anMiddle and expansive effects of Islamist participation on national political debates in Lebanon and Yemen. In addition, she has published two shorter pieces on Yemeni politics: "Does a Vote Equal a Voice?" (Middle East Report 252 [2009]), on the declining enthusiasm for formal political parties among Yemeni women, and "Hurricane Katrina in Yemen" (Transnational Broadcasting Studies 16 [2006]), on her experience viewing coverage of the hurricane with Yemenis and the discussions of development, race, and US power that this viewing stimulated. [End Page 134]
