Mervat Hatem

Mervat Hatem is Professor of Political Science at Howard University in Washington DC. She was president of the Middle East Studies Association in 2008-10. She has published more than fifty journal articles and book chapters on gender and politics in the Middle East and in North America. Her work examines, among other things, the phenomenon of Egyptian state feminism, the impact of economic and political liberalization on Egyptian and Arab women, and the convergence of Islamist and secular views on gender. She is the editor of the Arabic reader, Nahu Dirasat al-Nu` fi al-`Ulum al-Siyasiya [Towards the Study of Gender in Political Science] (Cairo: al-Mar’at wa al-Thakira, 2010). Her most recent book is Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of `A’sha Taymur (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).