University of Alaska Anchorage

Faculty Member, History

Assistant Professor of History

College of Arts and Sciences

Thesis Title: "Veiled Intentions: Islam, Global Feminism, and U.S. Foreign Policy Since the Late 1970's"

About

I am broadly trained in the fields of U.S. foreign relations and international history (specialty), U.S. history (major field), and modern Europe and the Islamic world (outside field).  I received my Ph.D. in August 2010 from Temple University and am currently an Assistant Professor of History at University of Alaska Anchorage.

My research explores U.S. relations with the Islamic world from the late 1970s through the present through the lens of women's rights. I argue that increasing American public concern about the rights of women in Muslim countries following the Iranian Revolution eventually spurred U.S. policymakers to integrate women's rights goals into U.S. policy toward key Muslim countries like Afghanistan.  The American public, scholars, the media, women’s rights activists from the U.S. and Muslim countries, and policymakers have depicted Muslim men - particularly fundamentalists like the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Taliban - as bent on imprisoning women in medieval gender roles.  As the Muslim world became a key area of concern for Americans in the final decades of the twentieth century, this notion assumed a critical importance in influencing how Americans related to Muslim countries. 

My research explains the reasons for American scrutiny of the treatment of women in Muslim countries since the Iranian revolution and how Americans framed their criticism of Islamic gender relations in the U.S. public sphere.  As American criticism of the treatment of women in countries like Iran grew in the 1980s, women's rights activists - both from the U.S. and from Muslim countries - formed organizations committed to expanding women's rights in the Muslim world and began to lobby U.S. policymakers and the public to integrate women's rights concerns into U.S. foreign policy. 

Ultimately, my evidence suggests, the public concern about Muslim women’s oppression and the lobbying efforts by feminists spurred policymakers to begin to take women's rights into account when formulating policy toward Islamic countries, like Afghanistan, starting in the 1990s.  Broad public concern about Muslim women also created an available language for American policymakers to draw upon when dealing with the Muslim world, regardless of party affiliation.  Drawing attention to the oppression of women provided legitimacy and moral force for policymakers’ interventions in Islamic countries.