About the seminar:

Biographies of women warriors were a component of late-19th-century debates in print on gender and nature amongst Arabophone elites. In this regard, Jeanne d’Arc has been a particularly malleable icon with global circulation. This paper argues that nineteenth-century Arabic biographies of Jeanne d’Arc index a relatively fluid, ambiguous and differentiated (but forceful) discourse on gender and political voice that later became more fixed along nationalist-domestic lines. ‘Jeanne biographies’ accrue more nuanced significance when read alongside other woman-warrior images contributing to a contentious public conversation on gender-right’s appropriate role in modern nation-formation. Because the woman-warrior figure – against the backdrop of patriarchal gender expectations – admits of gender ambiguity or fluidity, it serves as one notation of how open to question a community’s gender conventions are at a given moment: here, Egypt and Ottoman Syria in an era of political stress and intellectual infrastructure-building.

About the speaker:

Professor Marilyn Booth is the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, Oxford University. She has just completed a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where she began research on a new project, Arabic conduct literature for boys and girls, 1870s-1920s. Her most recent monograph is Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History in fin-de-siecle Egypt (Edinburgh, 2015). She has also written books on biographies in the Arabic women’s press and on nationalist vernacular writing, and has edited or co-edited collections on histories of the harem, Egypt in the 1890s, and (currently) translation in the late Ottoman Empire. She is writing a book on the career of early feminist Zaynab Fawwaz. She has translated numerous novels, short story collections and memoirs from the Arabic.

Image credit: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (used in The Times)