Sherine Hamdy began as Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine in the Fall 2017. Before that, she was at Brown University, where she worked and taught since 2006. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from New York University Department of Anthropology. Her first book Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California, 2012) received Honorable Mention from the 2013 Clifford Geertz Prize from the American Anthropological Association's Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and is taught widely in courses in medical anthropology, Middle East studies, and cross-cultural bioethics. She has received numerous fellowships and recognition for her work, including the 2009 Rudolph Virchow Award from the Society of Medical Anthropology for her article "When the State and Your Kidneys Fail: Political Etiologies in an Egyptian Dialysis Ward" (American Ethnologist, 2008). She was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 2011-2012, and a Greenwall Foundation Scholar of Bioethics from 2012 to 2015. Her new research is a collaborative project with Professor Soha Bayoumi (Harvard) that critically engages with physicians' roles in the recent political upheavals in the Arab world. She also works in visual media, particularly with comics as a new medium for anthropology and is the co-author (with Coleman Nye) of Lissa: a story of friendship, medical promise, and revolution, which is the debut anthropological graphic novel of the University of Toronto Press' ethnoGRAPHIC series (Fall 2017).

Anthropology

Cultural Studies

Islamic Studies

Middle East/Near East Studies

Pop Culture

Gender/Women's Studies

Health

Egypt

North America

Body & Rel

Egyptian Society

Medical Anthro

Arabic (fluent)

French (advanced)

Spanish (fluent)