Frances S. Hasso is an Associate Professor in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University with secondary appointments in the faculties of Sociology and History. She is an Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. Before she joined Duke University in 2010, she taught for 10 years as a faculty member at Oberlin College. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections between transnational dynamics, states, and social movements and social practices in the Arab world.
As a ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow in Jordan in the spring of 2018, she is pursuing a research project titled “Palestinian Perinatal and Young Child Death during the British Mandate.” The project relies on archival research and interviews with elderly Palestinian women to examine their experiences with pregnancy, childbirth, and infant and child mortality during the British mandate (1920–1948). She also analyzes popular and scholarly oral history projects in Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon, looking for discussion of health practices, birth experiences, and perinatal and child death. In addition to conducting library and archival research, she seeks to interview women in Jordan about their memories of reproduction and their health experiences and practices, specifically Palestinian women who married and had at least one pregnancy before 1948.
Her recent book publications include Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions with Zakia Salime (Duke University Press, 2016) and Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2011). Recent articles include “Civil and the Limits of Politics in Revolutionary Egypt,” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Vol. 35:3, 2015), as well as “Bargaining with the Devil: States and Intimate Life,” in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (Vol. 10:2, 2014). Her scholarly publications are listed at https://franceshasso.net/publications/.
Frances Hasso earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has an M.A. in Arab Studies with a concentration in Economic Development from Georgetown University and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of California at Los Angeles. She also holds a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. She has received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Sociological Association/National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies.
