Kanwal Hameed

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of mid-20th century political movements in the Middle East and North Africa, and 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, and a Stuart Hall foundation RACE-Ed Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. 

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 little-known social histories from the 20th century Gulf, centring the intersections of gender, class, nationality and race within anti-colonial struggles. 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. There are two elements of my research that I am developing into future projects: the first draws on the work of Stuart Hall and others to think with racial difference and gendered racialisation in the study of the ethno-sectarian and national systems of classification in the Gulf under British colonialism. The second project is a transnational mapping of anti-imperial revolutionary movements in the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region after the June 1967 war.

“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, KohlAnticolonial 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. 

“View of the shoreline at Koweit [Kuwait]. At right, Lord Curzon and his staff are being carried ashore by Arab men from a small boat at far right. The Shaikh of Kuwait or his retainer stands at left alongside a horse waiting for the Europeans to come ashore. In the distant background, left of centre, a boat – probably a dhow – is moored.” Source: https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100024008052.0x000034 

Woven banner at Awal Women’s Society, Al Hidd, Bahrain.

Film Poster, “The Hour of Liberation has Struck” from “The Restoration of Heiny Srour: Cinema of Women’s Struggle and People’s Liberation”. Source: https://www.alaraby.co.uk/culture/استعادة-هيني-سرور-سينما-نضال-النساء-وتحرُّر-الشعوب