Middle Eastern Studies Program and American and Indigenous Studies Program Present
Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World
Monday, April 11, 2016
Olin Humanities, Room 202
6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Katherine Zoepf
For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and women are attending Qur’anic schools—and using the training to argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective. And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests in the Arab Spring. In Syria, before its civil war, Zoepf documents a complex society in the midst of soul searching about its place in the world and about the role of women. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who’ve found freedom in work outside the home. In Saudi Arabia she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising. This reading will illuminate some of the voices Zoepf showcases in her book.
Katherine Zoepf lived in Syria and Lebanon from 2004 to 2007 while working as a stringer for The New York Times; she also worked in the Times's Baghdad bureau in 2008. Since 2010, she has been a fellow at New America. Her work has appeared in The New York Observer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is a graduate of Princeton University and the London School of Economics.
For more information, call 845-758-6874, e-mail [email protected],
or visit http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/books/review/excellent-daughters-by-katherine-zoepf.html.
Time: 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 202