Professor, Anthropology
School of Social Sciences

bioethics, medical anthropology, comics, Arab world, Egypt, SWANA diaspora in North America, narrative, ethno-fiction

lissagraphicnovel.com

AWARDS AND HONORS

Sabbagh Distinguished Lectureship, University of Arizona, 2020.

PROSE Award, Cultural Anthropology & Sociology, American Publishers Award for Lissa (2018)

Clifford Geertz Book Prize, Society for the Anthropology of Religion, Honorable Mention for Our Bodies Belong to God (2013)

Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, Princeton

Rudolph S. Virchow Award, for best professional article, Society for Medical Anthropology (2009)

Sherine Hamdy is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine, where she joined the faculty in 2017. Prior to that she was a tenured faculty member at Brown University where she taught since 2006. Her first book 'Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt' was published by the University of California in 2012. She has published widely on the themes of Muslim medical ethics, the political economic distribution of disease in Egypt, and the role of physicians in the Arab spring uprisings. Hamdy also inaugurated the University of Toronto Press series ethnoGRAPHIC with her co-authored graphic novel 'Lissa: a story of friendship, medical promise, and revolution' which combines panel to panel comics narration with her medical anthropology research. She currently serves as Series Editor for the University of Toronto Press ethnoGRAPHIC series, and encourages academics to adopt multiple media forms in their distribution of research findings. She runs a summer book club on SWANA diaspora/Egyptian-American literature.

Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California, 2002)

Lissa: a story of friendship, medical promise, and revolution (University of Toronto Press, 2017), co-authored with Coleman Nye, illustrated by Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer

“The Trauma of Medical Training in Two Webcomics: a Call for Multimodal Citation” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2023 Open source article: Vol. 00, Issue 0, pp. 1–23, ISSN 0745-5194, online ISSN 1548-1387. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12746

(co-authored with Soha Bayoumi) “Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and Medical Mobilization in Post-revolutionary Egypt” 2022 Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, Special Issue on Power and Medicine in the Middle East, pp 1-25 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-022-09802-4

(co-authored with Coleman Nye) "Comics and revolution as global public health intervention: The Case of Lissa." Global public health (2019): 1-21.

co-authored with Soha Bayoumi, “Egypt’s Popular Uprisings and the Stakes of Medical Neutrality,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2016

“All Eyes on Egypt: Islam and the Medical Use of Dead Bodies Amidst Cairo’s Political Unrest” Medical Anthropology 2016

co-authored with Megan Crowley-Matoka, “Gendering the Gift of Life: Family Politics and Kidney Donation in Egypt and Mexico” Medical Anthropology, 2016

“Political Challenges to Biomedical Universalism: Kidney Failure Among Egypt’s Poor” Medical Anthropology Volume 32(4): 374-392. 2013

“Not Quite Dead: Why Egyptian Doctors Refuse the Diagnosis of Death by Neurological Criteria” Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Volume 35(2): 147-160. 2013

“Strength and Vulnerability After Egypt’s Arab Spring Uprisings,” American Ethnologist, Volume 39(1):43-48. 2012

“The Organ Transplant Debate in Egypt: A Social Anthropological Analysis” Droits et Cultures Volume 59:357-365. 2010

“Islam, Fatalism, and Medical Intervention: Lessons from Egypt on the Cultivation of Forbearance (Sabr) and Reliance on God (Tawakkul)” Anthropological Quarterly Volume 82(1):173-196. 2009

“When the State and Your Kidneys Fail: Political Etiologies in an Egyptian Dialysis Ward,” American Ethnologist, Volume 35(4):1-17. (Winner of the Rudolph Virchow Professional Award from the Society of Medical Anthropology). 2008

“Blinding Ignorance: Medical Science, Diseased Eyes, and Religious Practice in Egypt” Arab Studies Journal, Volume XII(2)/Volume XIII(1):26-45. 2005

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6500

Last updated
02/13/2024