Draft:Beth Baron

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Beth Baron is an American historian of the modern Middle East specializing in gender history and the social history of modern Egypt. Her publications cover gender, nationalism, social welfare, and medicine in modern Egypt. She is Distinguished Professor of History at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Education

Baron received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Dartmouth College in 1980. She earned a Master of Arts in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 1982. She completed her PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1988.

Academic career

Baron joined the faculty of the City College of New York in 1989 after serving as a visiting assistant professor at Franklin and Marshall College from 1988-1989. She was promoted to associate professor in 1994 and to professor in 2001. In 2017 she was appointed Distinguished Professor of History at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. Baron co-founded the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the Graduate Center in 2001 and later directed the MA Program in Middle Eastern Studies from 2008 to 2018. She has been a member of the doctoral faculty in the CUNY Graduate Center PhD Program in History since 1995.

Baron has held visiting appointments and fellowships at several institutions, including Princeton University and the University of Georgia’s Center for the Humanities and Arts.

Professional service

Baron served as editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies from 2009 to 2014 and as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) from 2015 to 2017. During her presidency, the association participated in litigation challenging United States travel restrictions affecting several Muslim-majority countries.

Baron has also served as editor of the Contemporary Middle East Series at Cambridge University Press and on advisory boards for several academic organizations and journals.

Honors and fellowships

Baron’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants from organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Carnegie Corporation.

She received the Women Historians of the Middle East Mentorship Award in 2022.

Books

Hard Labors: A History of Birth Work in Egypt (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (Stanford University Press, 2014).

Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (University of California Press, 2005; reprinted by American University in Cairo Press, 2005; UC Press paperback edition, 2007).

The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (Yale University Press, 1994); reviewed in The New York Times Book Review (12 June 1994); paperback released in 1997; translated into Arabic by the Supreme Council of Culture in Egypt, 1999.

Journal Articles

“Colliding Bodies: Prostitutes, Soldiers, and Venereal Diseases in Colonial Egypt,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol.96, no.2 (Summer 2022): 211-36.

“The Origins of Family Planning in Egypt: American Experts, Aziza Hussein, and the State,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no.3 (Fall 2008): 31-57.

“Women, Honour, and the State: Evidence from Egypt,” Middle Eastern Studies 42, no.1 (2006): 1-20.

“The Meanings of Women’s Demonstrations in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution,” (in Arabic) al-Nahj 11, no.41 (1995): 235-43.

“Readers and the Women’s Press in Egypt,” Poetics Today 15, no.2 (1994): 217-40.

“The Construction of National Honour in Egypt,” Gender and History 5, no.2 (1993): 244-55.

“Unveiling in Early Twentieth Century Egypt: Practical and Symbolic Considerations,” Middle Eastern Studies 25, no.3 (1989): 370-86.