The Department of Arabic Language and Cultures presents

AraBooks: Literature, politics, society and the arts from the Middle East and its diasporas

Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution
Professor Sherine Hamdy (University of California, Irvine)

Sherine Hamdy is Professor of anthropology at UC Irvine, where she studies medical anthropology and science and technology in the Middle East. She’s an experimental ethnographer who uses comics to bring her research to a wider audience. Her first graphic novel Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2017), is a fictional piece based on her research, which Sherene Hamdy co-authored with her former student Coleman Nye. The story is set against the backdrop of the Egyptian 2011 revolution and presents a way for readers outside of academia to relate to topics that touch on health, politics, and medicine in the U.S. and Egypt.

Outside of her work in comics, Professor Hamdy published Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggles for Human Dignity in Egypt. Prof Hamdy  anthropological studies have been published in Medical Anthropology; Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry; the Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics; and American Ethnologist.

Join online via Zoom.

For more information, contact: Dr Lucia Sorbera – lucia.sorbera@sydney.edu.au

About AraBooks

AraBooks is a seminar series curated by the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures. It hosts a series of talks by scholars, writers and artists whose scholarship and artistic productions focus on the Arab World, the Middle East and its diasporas. Each semester we explore a thread through the discussion of a series of books and in conversation with their authors.

The thread of Semester 2, 2021 is: Gender and Politics in the Arab World

See our upcoming talks (4–6pm, AEST/AEDT Sydney time):

• 23 Sept: Nicola Pratt – Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (University of California Press, 2020)
• 21 Oct: Bahia Shehab – You Can Crush the Flowers: A Visual Memoir of the Egyptian Revolution (Gingko Press, London, 2021)
• 4 Nov: Liyana Kayali – Palestinian Women and Popular Resistance: Perceptions, Attitudes and Strategies (Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon  2021)

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