Mounira M Charrad
Associate Professor, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, College of Liberal Arts
Associate Professor, Center for Women's and Gender Studies, College of Liberal Arts
Phone: +1 512 232 6300, +1 512 232 6311
Email: charrad@utexas.edu
Mounira M. Charrad's research has centered on state formation, colonialism, law, citizenship, kinship and womens rights. More specifically, she has considered strategies of state building in kin-based societies and how struggles over state power shaped the expansion or curtailment of women's rights. She is currently studying conceptions of modernity in legal discourses in the Middle East. Challenging explanations of politics based on a textual approach to religion, she offers instead a focus on social solidarities and where they are grounded (kinship, ethnicity, or other). Her work has been translated into French and Arabic, and featured on websites and in the media. Her research has been funded by several grants including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Institute of Maghribi Studies
Dr. Charrad is the award-winning author of "States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postocolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco" (2001). The book won the 2002 Distinguished Book Award in Political Sociology from the American Sociological Association, and the 2002 Hamilton Award for best book in any field from the University of Texas. Focusing on the broad theme of how politics shape the interpretation of culture, her publications in French and in English have addressed issues of state formation, culture, women's rights, Islamic law, and citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa. She serves on the boards of the Institute of Maghribi Studies and the Association of Middle East Women's Studies, and has held faculty appointments at Harvard, Brown and the University of California, San Diego.