Mounira (Maya) Charrad is an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Baker Institute, Rice University. Her book, States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco won numerous national awards including Best Book in Sociology from the American Sociological Association and Best Book on Politics and History Greenstone Award from the American Political Science Association. Her articles have appeared in major scholarly journals. She has edited or co-edited Patrimonial Power in the Modern World; Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire; Women’s Agency: Silences and Voices; and Femmes, Culture et Société au Maghreb. Her current research addresses social movements during the Arab Spring. Her new book considers secularism and women’s associations in Tunisia. Her work has been translated into French, Arabic, and Chinese.
Rita Stephan is a research fellow at The Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University and the Regional Coordinator for Religious and Ethnic Minorities at the United States Agency of International Development. She is the co-editor of In Line with the Divine: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Lebanon (Warwick, RI: Abelian Academic 2015); and numerous publications on the women’s movements in the Middle East and counting the Middle Eastern community in the US Census.
