Kanwal Hameed

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of mid-20th century political movements in the Middle East and North Africa. I focus on the modern history of the Gulf, and its connections across multiple regions. 

I received my PhD from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Affairs (IAIS) University of Exeter, UK, in June 2022, and have since been a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut (OIB), a Researcher on the Mapping Connections: China and the Middle East project at IAIS, University of Exeter, a teaching fellow at the SOAS Department of Politics and International Studies, a Stuart Hall foundation RACE-Ed Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh, and an Early Career Fellow at the Arab Council for Social Sciences, during which time I was an affiliate at the American University of Beirut (AUB).

As a historian, I am interested in and moved by the idea of an archival commons, which includes cultural production, movement materials, and the practices of ordinary people to capture, document and preserve a record of their everyday lives, and the life of their communities.

At Trinity, I teach tutorials in nineteenth and twentieth-century European and World history, and Historical Methods/ Approaches to History, and European and World history.

For the Faculty of History, I convene the Further Subject "The Middle East in the Age of Empire, 1830-1971" co-taught with Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College.

My research traces lesser-known social histories from the 20th century Gulf, working through the intersections of gender, class, nationality, race and ethno-sect within political movements. I take a novel approach to the Gulf by foregrounding its regional and transnational entanglements against the backdrop of the history of Empires. My work engages with theory emergent from the anti-colonial context from the region, and from other disciplines, to contribute to new ways of theorising the Gulf, political movements, and the era of decolonisation.

I am currently preparing a monograph based on my doctoral research, which thinks about the Gulf through colonialism to independence as ‘worldmaking from below’, and a journal article on women’s participation in anti-colonial movements in the Gulf. My next project, “Against Defeat” is about those ‘defeated’ by history. It focusses on anti-imperial revolutionary movements in the MENA region that emerged from the devastation of the 1967 war, which is remembered in Arabic as al-Hazima, ‘the defeat’. I am interested in The Defeat as a historical-political moment, as well as the cultural production of defeat. This project asks: what does it mean to be defeated, and what does it mean to resist? – and what is the role of the academic, the historian at a time of genocide in Gaza, as well as military and structural violence and rising fascism elsewhere?

[Forthcoming] “The Women of Awal: Movements for Gender Equality in Bahrain”, A Handbook of Feminism in the Middle East and North Africa, Eds. Hatoon Ajwad Al-Fassi, Nawar Al-Hassan Golley and Zahia Smail Salhi, Cambridge University Press.

[Forthcoming] “The People’s Republic and the building of a People’s War: China, Palestine, and Dhofar”, British Journal of Middle East Studies.

[Forthcoming] “The Many Faces of Jamila – Women and Lineages of Revolt in Bahrain”, Middle East Critique [Special Issue] “Situating the Gulf’s Anti-Imperialist Currents in History and Theory”, Eds. Wafa Al-Sayed and Hsinyen Lai.

“Where Are the Revolutionary Women of West Asia and North Africa?” co-authored with Sara Salem, She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped The World", Eds. Marral Shamshiri and Sorcha Thomson, London (Pluto Press: 2023).

“One Struggle, Many Fronts: The National Union of Kuwaiti Students and Palestine”, Eds. Sorcha Thompson & Pelle Olsen, International Solidarity with the Palestinian Revolution (1965-1982),London (IB Tauris: 2023).

“Toward a liberation pedagogy” co-authored with Katie Natanel and Amal Khalaf, Kohl Anticolonial Feminisms, January 2023.

“Halwa, Mahyawa and Multiple Registers of Life in the Gulf”, Archive Stories, 20 July 2023. Eds. Mai Taha and Sara Salem, accessible via: https://archive-stories.com/Halwa-Mahyawa-and-Multiple-Registers-of-Life-in-the-Gulf. 

Photograph from the National Union of Kuwaiti Students (NUKS) fifth annual conference in Kuwait, 1970, from al-Ittihad magazine, produced by NUKS, September 1970. In Sorcha Thompson & Pelle Olsen, International Solidarity with the Palestinian Revolution (1965-1982),London (IB Tauris: 2023).

Woven banner at Awal Women’s Society (AWS), Al Hidd, Bahrain. The term Awal refers to Bahrain’s historic name, thought to have been used between its ancient Dilmun civilisation (2,000 BCE) up until the early Islamic period (7th CE). Officially founded in 1970, AWS was initiated by Bahraini female students who had become politically active during their time at universities in Baghdad, Beirut, and Cairo, and their experiences of the Dhofar Revolution (1965), the Palestinian Revolution (1965), and the June 1967 war.