Application

Mona Ali

Associate Professor, English Department

The University of Cairo, Egypt

Research: New Feminism in the Making: Recent Trends in Gender Theories: A Reader

Dr. Mona Ali is an Associate Professor at both Cairo University and the American University in Cairo. She received her Masters and PH. D. degrees in American Literature but her publications also include papers on translation: theory and practice, travel literature, women writing and post-colonial literature. Dr. Ali is a member of two of the most active NGOs in Egypt; namely, the Women and Memory Forum and New Women Research Center. She has had stories published and participated in many story-telling evenings within the framework of the Women and Memory Forum's project of rewriting folk stories and stories from the One Thousand and One Nights from a gender sensitive prespective. She is editor-in-chief of Tiba, the theoretical magazine of the New Woman Research Center. Her awards include two Fulbright grants; one to the TESOL Summer Institute (1989), the other to the American Studies Research Center in Hydrabad, India (1991). She was also awarded a USIS IVP grant

Selected Publications:

"Mapping the Self on the Lands of the Other: A Reading of Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun and Serageldin's The Cairo House" Cairo Studies. Cairo: Department of English Lnaguage and Literature. (March, 2004.)

"The Dilectics of Resistance and Empowerment in the Woman and Memory Forum's Project of 'Said the Female Story-Teller'", a paper published in Tiba (January, 2003.)

A translation into Arabic of Leila Ahmad's Women and Gender in Islam. Cairo: The Supreme Council for Culture, 1999. (With Hala Kamal)

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New Feminism in the Making: Recent Trends in Gender Theories: A Reader

This project aims at compiling some of the most recent and important work on gender theories in the English language in an anthology and translating it into Arabic. The main goal is to fill certain gaps in gender scholarship and activism in Egypt that include academic and social ones. Due to dearth of materials on gender theories in Arabic, Egyptian scholars from public universities, with little or no knowledge of English, depend on very few works that are written originally in Arabic or are translated into this language. Their research, therefore, is confined to certain issues and theories that are dealt with in these works. Designing a gender course for Arabic-speaking Egyptian students faces the same problems; students study theories that are sometimes outdated without being aware of this fact due to the lack of recent translated works. On the other hand, grassroots feminist activists who are usually monolingual join the field with much enthusiasm but with little knowledge of the origin of the ideas they are propagating. They, thus, feel rather threatened and exposed when accusations of westernization and propagating colonialist agendas are directed at them and fail to answer these accusations. They also feel inferior to elite activists who are often bilingual as they usually get their education in private language schools. More knowledge of gender and feminist theories will, therefore, definitely be of great help to monolingual scholars, students and activists interested in gender and women studies. Hence comes the importance of the work I am proposing to shoulder; it will be empowering to all the parties involved whether they are feminist scholars, students or activists. It is also empowering to Egyptian women who are the primary beneficiaries of feminist efforts whether on the level of scholarship or activism.

The NCS Fellowship will provide me with the time needed to accomplish this work. I have already received invitations from Women and Gender Studies at Yale and NYU to contact scholars in the field who design and teach courses on women and gender studies to consult with them about the best materials I can use for my project. I plan to spend my stay in the States to try to get the copyright for the materials I am going to include in the anthology.

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