Women’s Rights Guest Speakers
Our Previous Guest Speakers
Previous WRRS guest speakers are listed here together with their chosen seminar topic.
Nafiseh Sharifi (University of Exeter) Rethinking Masculinity Through Men’s Sexual Experiences in Tehran
Sawsene Nejjar (University of Oxford) Women’s Religious Leadership in Morocco: A Catalyst for Mudawana Reform
Emrah Karakuş (LSE) Sacrificial Intimacies: The Value of Life, Labor, and Desire in Queer Kurdish Worlds
Lisa Blaydes (Stanford University) States and Social Hierarchies in Kuwait and the Arab States of the Gulf Region
Tugba Bozcaga (King’s College London) The gender effect in intra-party meritocracy
Nermin Allam (Rutgers University) The afterlife goes on: the consequences of women’s participation in the 2011 Egyptian uprising
Amal W Nazzal (Birzeit University) Feminism in Palestine
Heba El-Shazli (George Mason University) Reflections on Tunisian women’s continued fight for respect, dignity and rights
Sarah Bush (University of Pennsylvania) Economic diversification and climate change in the Middle East
Rosa Rahimi (University of Oxford) Deviant women: citizenship, political participation, and incarceration of the secular left in post-revolutionary Iran (1979-1990)
Mona Tajali (Agnes Scott College) Women and electoral politics in Iran and Turkey: undemocratic structures and feminist resistance
Sahar Maranlou (Royal Holloway, London University), Naghmeh Sohrabi (Harvard University), Pardis Asadi Zeidabadi (City, University of London) MEC & OSGA present ‘Women, protests, revolutions: Iran uprising after five months’
Sultan Doughan (Goldsmiths, University of London) Palestinian women on demonic grounds? When gender is undone by the German security discourse
Roel Meijer (Radboud University) Women’s movements and citizenship in the Middle East
Janet Afary (University of California Santa Barbara) Informal unions in MENASA: a new form of cohabitation?
Esther Hertzog (Zefat Academic College) Threatened motherhood in the Israeli welfare state: the discourse and the practice behind the disqualification of disadvantaged women’s motherhood
Nacim Pak-Shiraz (University of Edinburgh) The right to move: Gender and space in Iranian Cinema
Ramina Sotoudeh (Yale University) A match made in heaven: love and piety in Iranian spousal selection
Mawahib Abubakr (Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics) Qatari women and the labour market: towards an empowering alternative
Irene Schneider (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) Debating the law, creating gender
Marie Ladier-Fouladi (French National Center for Scientific Research / Centre d’Études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques) Women’s rights on the altar of a strategic stake: the new population policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Lina Tori Jan (University of Oxford) Exclusion and resistance: The betrayal of the Afghan peace process
Hannah Elsisi (University of Cambridge) Women’s Negotiating Respectability between the space of the prison and the place of woman, Egypt 1946-1965
Maral Sahebjame (University of Washington) Social change through presence: white marriage in Iran
Hilary Burrage (Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics) Patriarchs and proxy perpetrators? Men and female genital mutilation
Nadia Aghtai (University of Bristol) Faith and the search for justice: Sharia councils and gender-based violence
Mine Yildirim (Norwegian Helsinki Committee’s Freedom of Belief Initiative project) Challenging the limited view: the case of the Women in Mosques Movement
Benjamin Dubreulle (Maison Française d’Oxford) ‘God does not Discriminate’: inclusive mosques. Politics in France and the United Kingdom
Lea Taragin-Zeller (Woolf Institute) Sisterhood revisited: Jewish-Muslim feminist alliances in the UK
Hilary Kalmbach (University of Sussex) Where are the women? Education, authority and gender in Egypt 1870-1950
Behnaz Hosseini (University of Vienna) Trafficking and slavery under ISIS: trauma and rehabilitation of Yezidi female survivors
Tomoko Yamagishi (Meiji University) Women’s football and futsal in Iran: their challenges and struggle
Marilyn Booth (University of Oxford) Jeanne d’Arc, Arab hero? Warrior women, gender confusion
Ozlem Galip (University of Oxford) From Kurdistan to Europe: Kurdish literary, artistic and cultural activism by Kurdish women intellectuals
Deena Alasfoor (University of Oxford) Tale of two Omani women
Shahla Tizro (York St John University) The archaeology of experience of domestic violence against women in Iran
Elife Bicer-Deveci (University of Oxford) Women’s movement from late 19th century until 1930s in Istanbul
Mariam Memarsadeghi (Tavaana) Women and the struggle for democracy in Iran
Naysan Adlparvar (Universities of Yale) Between love and lineage: elopement, rights and violence in an Afghan valley
Kamiar Alaei (University of Albany) Between conservatism and pragmatism: crafting a human rights-based approach to HIV/AIDS related services for women in the Middle East
Basma Al-Mutlaq (SOAS) Dancing with words: subverting the master narrative in Saudi women’s literature
Joanna De Groot (University of York) Gender, space and women’s rights in 19th century Iran: some reflections and questions
Ezgi Başaran (University of Oxford) Women in ‘new Turkey’: the story of how we lost ground
Nadje Al-Ali (SOAS) Kurdish women’s rights in Turkey and beyond: between nationalism and radical democracy
Zep Kalb (University of Oxford) Schooling society and state: women and the teachers’ movement in Iran
Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick) Gendered paradoxes of socio-political transformations in the Arab World after 2011
Tess Tico-Young (Oxfam) Oxfam and gender mainstreaming in humanitarian action: lessons learnt in the MENA region
Marcia Inhorn (University of Yale) The ongoing Iraq war: impacts on gender, health, and society
Sophie Chamas (University of Oxford) Demasculising Hezbollah: women of ‘The Resistance’
Zuzanna Olszewska (University of Oxford) The cyber-politics of Afghan women’s rights
Stephanie Berry (University of Sussex) Securitization of Muslim women in the European Court of Human Rights
Leila Alikarami (Lawyer and legal advisor in human rights) Women and equality in Iran: society and activism
Mariam Memarsadeghi (Tavaana) Struggling for gender equality in the digital age: the case of the Iranian women’s rights movement
Abouali Vedadhir (University of Tehran) Women and medical education: is gender discrimination a myth or a reality in contemporary Iran?
Sara Bamdad (Warwick University) Infertility and gender in Iran
Helen Lackner (Consultant in social development): Gender issues in Yemen: women’s choices
Iris Agmon (Ben-Gurion University) A historiographic casualty of the Great War: the Ottoman Law of Family Rights (1917) & Pre-Mandate Palestine
Mastoureh Fathi (University of East London) Modern Muslim Motherhood: Incorporating “excessive parenting” model
Marjaneh Halati (OMID Foundations) Screening and Q&A: ‘The glass house’
Zahra Tizro (York St John University) The archaeology of experience of domestic violence against women in Iran
Nazila Ghanea (University of Oxford) & Sultana Afdhal (WISH) Women’s Rights in the GCC: a dialogue
Shirin Saeidi (Centre for Gender Excellence, Sweden) Reconsidering categories of analysis: possibilities for feminist studies of conflict
Nadia Aghtaei (University of Bristol) The transgression of the rules of patriarchy by Iranian women through cyberspace
Katja Zvan Elliot (University of Oxford) Morocco and its women’s rights discourse: between amelioration and the status quo
Farniyaz Zaker (University of Oxford) The veil as architecture: conceptualisation and genderisation of the private and public space in Iran
Dörthe Engelcke (University of Oxford) Family law reform in Morocco and Jordan: a comparative approach
Parinaz Raisi (King’s College London) Islamic jurisprudence and the internal sources of women’s rights in Iran
Farhang Jahanpour (University of Oxford) The Green Movement, women, and the impact of the Arab uprisings on Iran
Tariq Ramadan (University of Oxford) Women in Islamic law and jurisprudence
Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (University of Oxford) Art Exhibition
Ann Harrison (Amnesty International UK) The family protection plan in Iran: a step backward for women
Anna Enayat (University of Oxford) Domestic violence in Iran: seriously battered refugees and the debate over the status of Iranian women in the British legal system
Binesh Hass (University of Oxford) Brainquake, boobquake
Nargess Tavassolian (SOAS) The paradox of the Iranian woman in law and society: the clash of rules and customs
Tahereh Hadian (University of Oxford) Women’s identity as reflected in Iranian films
Soraya Tremayne (University of Oxford) Population and reproductive health policies and women’s rights in Iran
Nazila Ghanea (University of Oxford) Human rights and minorities in Iran: a focus on the Baha’is
Marwa Daoudy (University of Oxford) Reflections on women in and after the Arab Spring
Mishana Hosseinioun (University of Oxford) The globalisation of universal human rights norms: implications for women’s rights reform in the Middle East
Mezna Qato (University of Cambridge) Women’s legal rights in Qatar
Zahra Tizro (St John University of York) Sexual violence and marriage contract in Iran
Marzieh Kaivanara (University of Bristol) Rhinoplasty and modernity in Iran
Henriette Dahan (Ben Gurion University) Palestinian activism in Israel: a Bedouin women leader in a changing Middle East
Mastoureh Fathi (University of Southampton) ‘We are middle class in English standards’: spatial belonging and classed identities of Iranian women migrants in Britain
Monireh Mohammadi (University of Oxford) The paradoxes of representation and Iranian women
Nadia Aghtai (Bristol University) Patriarchy and digital technologies
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (University of Oxford) Gender, Islam and the Sahrawi politics of survival
Atlas Torbati (University of Southampton) Perception of Iranian men towards sexual violence with intersection of religion/culture, sexuality, gender and immigration status
Kat Eghdamian (University of Oxford) Religion, gender and the experiences of displacement: insights from Syrian Christian refugees in Jordan
Mehri Zarifi-Kolyane (Oxford Centre for Mission Studies) Women, peace-building and digital technologies
Zahra Maranlou (University of Oxford) Iranian women’s rights
Sachiko Hoyosa (University of Oxford)
Mona Tajali (University of Oxford) Iranian women’s politicians and the elections
Marilyn Booth (University of Oxford) Cairo in Chicago, Chicago in Cairo, 1893: Arab women, Egyptian representations, and the World Columbian Exposition