Hilary Kalmbach

Dr. Hilary Kalmbach is a cultural and social historian based at the University of Sussex. She is the founding director of MENACS, the Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex and a Past President of the Syrian Studies Association.  Her research addresses culture, art, and religion in the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East and North Africa over the past 200 years, focusing in particular on authority, knowledge, education, and gender. Her work highlights how Islamic traditions and institutions are continually being reinvented in ways that impact states, societies, and cultures.  Trained at Princeton and Oxford Universities, she has held Fulbright and Clarendon Fellowships, as well as the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellowship at New College, Oxford.  She won the inaugural British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) Graduate Article Prize with her article, “Social and Religious Change in Damascus: One Case of Female Islamic Religious Authority.”  Her most recent publication, Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt, establishes a 130-year history for the conflict over the role of Islam in the Egyptian public sphere that led to the failure of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.  In so doing, it presents a new explanation for the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most influential Islamist movement of the twentieth century.  It is in production and will be released soon by Cambridge University Press.  Dr Kalmbach has served on the Councils of the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), the British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS), and the Syrian Studies Association (an affiliate of the Middle East Studies Association, MESA). Her next project is a cultural history of Islamic art and artisans in the Fez Medina.