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Associate Professor, Director

Feminist & Gender Studies, Arabic, Islamic, & Middle Eastern Studies

Nadia Guessous joined the Feminist and Gender Studies faculty at Colorado College in the fall of 2015. Her research and teaching interests include gender and sexuality; postcolonial and transnational feminism; religion and secularism; progressive politics; modern subjectivity; affect and viscerality; North Africa, the Middle East and Islam. Her current book project describes the sense of anxiety, exhaustion, and disorientation that prevails among older secular-leftist feminists in the wake of the Islamic Revival in contemporary Morocco. The book raises questions about the faith in the promises of secular modernity that undergirds this anxiety and argues that it gives rise to an exclusionary politics of avoidance that comes in the way of a more generous ethos of intersubjective and cross-generational exchange. The book contributes to thinking about feminism in non-teleological ways by highlighting some of the tragic consequences that can accompany the search for feminist progress. It also seeks to think about the affect and blind spots of secular progressive subjectivities. Although based on research prior to the Arab Uprisings, the book provides insights into some of the fractures, fissures and intersubjective tensions that continue to make alliances difficult across political and ideological lines in postcolonial places like Morocco.

Nadia Guessous received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 2011. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University from 2012-2014, and before that (2009-2012) a Faculty Fellow and Director of Graduate Studies at the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU. Nadia has also taught as a Visiting Lecturer at Amherst College, Columbia University, Barnard College and Princeton University. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award, two American Institute for Maghrib Studies Research grants, a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Women's Studies Dissertation Fellowship, and a Five College Dissertation Writing Fellowship. She has published her work in a number of journals including Hespéris-Tamuda, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, American Anthropologist, Confluences Méditerranée, The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Review of Middle East Studies, and Jadaliyya. She is also the author of a study on women, gender and political violence during the years of lead in postcolonial Morocco, which was commissioned by the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission in 2005.

Regular Classes

• FG110 Introduction to Feminist & Gender Studies
• FG211 Critical Feminist Methodologies
• FG218 The Discourse of the Veil
• FG219 Gendered Controversies
• FG222 Gender & Sexuality in the Modern Middle East and its Diasporas
• FG318 The Politics of Transnational Feminism
• FG320 Middle Eastern and Islamic Feminist Thought
• FG322 Junior Seminar