Contributors
- Contributors
Lihi Ben Shitrit is Assistant Professor at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia, Athens, and Visiting Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and Religion and Society at Harvard Divinity School. She holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. in political science from Yale University, and a B.A. in Middle Eastern studies from Princeton University. Ben Shitrit's research centers on the intersections of gender, religion, and politics in the Middle East.
Marie Duboc is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tübingen in Germany. She is a political sociologist studying Middle East politics through the lens of social movements. Duboc is particularly interesting in the upsurge of labor protests in the Middle East and in the sociopolitical transformations resulting from economic policies. In 2010-2011, she served as a postdoctoral researcher at the National University of Singapore's Middle East Institute and as an academic visitor at the University of Oxford's St. Edmund Hall. In 2012, Duboc received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the School of Advanced Social Science Studies in France. She is now working on the publication of her Ph.D. dissertation, an ethnographic study of labor strikes in the Egyptian textile sector.
Rita Giacaman is Professor of Public Health at the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University in the West Bank, occupied Palestinian territory. During the 1980s, she participated as a researcher and practitioner in the Palestinian social action movement, which led to the development of the Palestinian primary health care model. During the 1990s, Giacaman participated in building the Palestinian [End Page 151] community based disability rehabilitation network. Since 2000, she has been focusing on understanding the impact of chronic war-like conditions and excessive exposure to violence on the health and well-being of Palestinians, with an emphasis on psychosocial health, and ways in which interventions could generate the needed active and positive resilience and resistance to ongoing war-like conditions, especially among youth.
Penny Johnson is an independent researcher who works closely with the Institute of Women's Studies at Birzeit University, where she edits the Review of Women's Studies. Her recent writing and research on gender dynamics in Palestine has focused on weddings during the two Palestinian intifadas, unmarried women, and young Palestinians' talk about proper and improper marriages. She is an Associate Editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly and a member of the Arab Families Working Group. A former coordinator of the Prisoners' Committee at Birzeit University (1982-93), Johnson lives in Ramallah.
Amálie Le Renard is a Permanent Researcher in Sociology the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, Centre Maurice Halbwachs, and teaches gender studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences). She has studied political sociology and the Arabic language. Le Renard's Ph.D. focused on young urban Saudi women's access to public spaces and lifestyles in Riyadh in the context of "reform;" it is published in French under the title Femmes et espaces publics en Arabie Saoudite (Paris: Dalloz, 2011). Her monograph in English should be published in 2014 by Stanford University Press. Le Renard's current project deals with gender, class, and nationality hierarchies in multinational professional worlds of the Arabian Peninsula.
Diane Singerman is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. She also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. Singerman is the co-founder and co-director of Middle East Studies at American University and served as a Fulbright Hays Scholar. She has received a Social Science Research Council Dissertation [End Page 152] Fellowship and the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences. Singerman's research focuses on political change from below, particularly in the Middle East, and more specifically in Egypt. Her work examines the formal and informal side of politics, gender, social movements, globalization, youth, and urban politics. Singerman's publications include Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity (edited, 2009), Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle...
