Rate My Professor Amy Kallander

Amy Aisen Kallander is Professor in the History Department at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, where she also serves as faculty affiliate with Women’s and Gender Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. Kallander is a historian of the early modern and modern Middle East, with expertise in modern Middle East and North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, women and gender, Tunisia, French and French Empire, and colonialism. Her research examines the role of modern womanhood and women in postcolonial state and society, including state feminism in domestic and international politics, economic development, intellectual conversations, cultural expressions, and social shifts amid political change and women’s rights activism across the Middle East. She was promoted to full professor in 2022. Kallander teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East, the Arab Revolutions, popular culture, women and gender in Middle East history, Palestine and Israel, and gender and race in European colonial empires.

Her first book, Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia (University of Texas Press, 2013), offers a social history of women and the family that governed Tunisia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her second monograph, Tunisia’s Modern Woman: Nation-Building and State Feminism in the Global 1960s (Cambridge University Press, 2021), explores these themes in depth. Key publications include “Transnational Intimacies and the Construction of the New Nation: Tunisia and France in the 1960s” in French Politics, Culture, and Society (2021); “Miniskirts and ‘Beatniks’: Gender Roles, National Development, and Morals in 1960s Tunisia” in International Journal of Middle East Studies (2018); “Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East” (co-authored with L. Kozma) in American Historical Review (2018); and contributions to edited volumes such as The Palgrave Handbook of African Men and Masculinities (2024) and A Companion to Global Gender History (2020). Her writing has appeared in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Report Online, Arab Media & Society, and other outlets, contributing to understandings of gender, nationalism, and colonialism in the Middle East.