Dr Marya Hannun

I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, where I serve as the Managing Editor of MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project).

My current research project examines women’s movements and legal reform in early-twentieth century Afghanistan, focusing on the years leading up to and following World War I and the decline of the Ottoman Empire (1880-1929). Drawing on oral histories and archival material in a range of languages, including Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, it demonstrates that Afghan women were not merely objects of reform, as existing scholarship tends to depict them, but consequential historical actors who negotiated and influenced the legal reforms of the period.

Rewriting this history through women’s narratives that center the south-south circulation of ideas and people illustrates how spaces like classrooms in the first Afghan school for girls or the burgeoning women’s press in Kabul are essential to our understanding, not only of Afghan political history, but transnational conversations about gendered reform that reverberated from Cairo to Kabul to Lahore.

Biography:

I obtained my doctorate from Georgetown University, where I have also held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.