Associate Professor
Malek Abisaab is an Associate Professor of History at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, where he teaches courses dealing with the social and political transformation of the Middle East and women in Islamic societies, exploring new conceptual tools and comparative frameworks for discussing gender, labor and the nation-state in the Middle East. He authored Militant Women of a Fragile Nation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010); “Shi`ite Peasants and a New Nation in Colonial Lebanon: the intifada (uprising) of Bint Jubayl, 1936,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (November, 2009); “Orientalism and Historiography of Arab Women and Work,” Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World (HWWA) (Fall, 2009); “Contesting Space: Gendered Discourse and Labor among Lebanese Women,” in Ghazi Falah and Caroline Nagel eds., Geographies of Muslim Women (New York: Guilford Publications, 2005), 249-274; and “’Unruly’” Workingwomen: Contesting French Colonialism and the National State in Lebanon, 1940-1946,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 16, no. 3(2004): 55-82 and co-authored with Rula Jurdi Abisaab, The Shi`ites of Lebanon: Modernism, Communism, and Hizbullah’s Islamists (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014).
Education
PhD Binghamton, SUNY, 2001
MA City University of New York, 1992
BA The Lebanese University, Beirut, 1982
Teaching and research interests
Modern Middle Eastern history; colonialism and the nation-state; women and resistance; women, work and family in global perspective; women and war; Wahhabi Islam; Labor and gender in the Arab world; Muslim women, modernity and Islamic movements.
Current Projects
Current research deals with Syrian-Lebanese women and civil wars; female domestic labor in Lebanon; Islamic movements; peasant and labor unrests in Lebanon during and after the French colonial period and co-authoring a work on the Shi`ite of Lebanon.
Representative publications
The Shi`ites of Lebanon: Modernism, Communism and Hizbullah`s Islamists, co-authored with Rula Abisaab (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press), 2014.
الربيع (او الخريف) العربي والنموذج التركي، مجلة الاداب، العدد ١٠-١٢، ٢٠١١
“Shi`ite Peasants and a New Nation in Colonial Lebanon: the intifada (uprising) of Bint Jubayl, 1936,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 29, no. 3 (November, 2009): 483-501.
Militant Women of a Fragile Nation, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009.
“Contesting Space: Gendered Discourse and Labor among Lebanese Women,” in Ghazi Falah and Caroline Nagel eds., Geographies of Muslim Women (New York: Guilford Publications, 2005), 249-274
“The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).” Encyclopedia of the Modern World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
"'Unruly' Workingwomen: Contesting French Colonialism and the National State in Lebanon, 1940-1946," Journal of Women’s History, vol. 16, no. 3 (2004), 55-82.
"A Century after Qasim Amin: Fictive Kinship and Historical Uses of Tahrir al-Mar’a (The Liberation of Women)," Al-Jadid, vol. 6, no. 31, (2000), 8-11.
"Striving for Labor Law: Tobacco Women between French Colonial Authority and the Lebanese State," JUSUR, vol.15, (1999), 50-66.
