Portrait of Mounira Charrad

Mounira Charrad

Nonresident Fellow

Biography

Mounira M. (Maya) Charrad, Ph.D., is a nonresident fellow with the Baker Institute Edward P. Djerejian Center for the Middle East, an award-winning author and an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Her book “States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco” (UC Press) received six distinguished awards, including the Best Book in Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association and the Best Book on Politics and History Greenstone Award from the American Political Science Association.

She has edited or co-edited “Patrimonial Power in the Modern World” (Sage); “Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire” (Emerald, Political Power and Social Theory Book Series); “Women Rising: In and Beyond the Arab Spring” (NYU Press); “Women’s Agency: Silences and Voices” (Special Issue of Women’s Studies International Forum) and “Femmes, Culture et Société au Maghreb” (Afrique Orient). Her new book, “Forging Feminism: From Autocracy to Revolution in Tunisia,” is forthcoming with Columbia University Press. Her articles have appeared in major scholarly journals. Her research centers on state formation, colonialism, law, citizenship, kinship, women’s rights and social movements. She pioneered the study of how strategies of state building in kin-based societies affect women’s rights. Challenging explanations of politics based on a textual approach to religion, she calls attention instead to how social solidarities (kinship, marginality or associations) enter politics. Her work has been translated into French, Arabic and Chinese. It has been featured on academic websites and in the media. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and an undergraduate degree from the Sorbonne in Paris.

Contact at charrad@utexas.edu.