New Books in Gender

Samar Abdel-Rahman's Egyptian Male Film Stars in the Nasser Era: Envisioning a National Identity (American University of Cairo Press, 2026) explores male stardom in Egyptian cinema produced during the early years following the Free Officers' revolution of 1952, through the lives and careers of three key stars: Omar al-Sharif, Ismail Yassin, and Farid Shawqi. In attempting to find a balance between the traditional and the modern, the Nasser era placed an emphasis on education, work, and gender equality. Yet, faithfulness to Egyptian traditions and values remained a key part of the state’s vision of collective identity. Samar illuminates how these stars promoted a civic identity that aligned with the regime’s ambitions, and how each of them—through melodrama, comedy, and action—negotiated a different facet of masculine identity that spoke to the ambivalent constructions of hegemonic masculinity during this critical post-colonial period.
Samar Abdel-Rahman holds a PhD in film studies from King's College London and is currently a lecturer of World Cinema at the University of Liverpool. Her research, which focuses on stardom and performance in Middle Eastern and North African Cinemas, has been published in edited volumes including The Routledge Companion to European Cinema.
Saman Nasser holds an MA in world history from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff.

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Susan E. Kirtley and Nhora Lucía Serrano's Women in Comics (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) is a richly illustrated, essential guide to the importance of women in the comics space from across time and around the globe.
Comics in the form of editorial cartoons, comic strips, digital comics, comic books, and graphic novels have combined words and images to tell stories of hundreds of years. Though often overlooked, women have played a vital role in shaping this genre, both as creators and characters within the stories themselves.
Through six archetypes frequently found in comics—the patriot, the working woman, the socialite, the fashionista, the reporter, and the spy—Kirtley and Serrano trace some of comics’ most influential women. This insightful exploration of international characters celebrates the feminist role model Wonder Woman, the warrior-maiden Oscar François de Jarjayes in the gender-defying manga tale Berusiyu no Bara (The Rose of Versailles), the real-life groundbreaking journalist Nellie Bly, and many others. Profiles throughout the book highlight the important work of female creators, heralding the bravery of political cartoonists such as Corinne “Coco” Rey and Rayma Suprani, the power of biography as reportage with Marjane Satrapi and Sophia Glock, and the value of visibility with Alison Bechdel and Mariko Tamaki.

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How Girls Achieve points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Dr. Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender.
Educated women raise healthier families, build stronger communities, and generate economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Yet millions of disadvantaged girls never make it to school—and too many others drop out or fail. Upending decades of advice and billions of dollars in aid, Dr, Nuamah argues that this happens because so many challenges girls confront—from sexual abuse to unequal access to materials and opportunities—go unaddressed. But it isn’t enough just to go to school. What you learn there has to prepare you for the world where you’ll put that knowledge to work.
Dr. Nuamah reveals that developing resilience is not a gender-neutral undertaking. Preaching grit doesn’t help girls; it actively harms them. Drawing on her deep immersion in classrooms in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa, Nuamah calls for a new approach: creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms, and allow them to carve out their own paths to success.
Guest: Dr. Sally A. Nuamah is an associate professor of Urban Politics in Human Development, Social Policy and Political Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. She has received numerous awards; began the TWII Foundation to provide funding for girls striving to be first in their families to go to college; and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a Women and Public Policy fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Host is: Dr. Christina Gessler is the producer of the both Academic Life podcast and the show’s weekly newsletter. She is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics.
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How Schools Make Race
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Remembering Lucille
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Teaching About Race And Racism
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
This episode was originally published Nov 6, 2020

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Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing (Syracuse UP, 2025) explores the legacy of intersectional stereotypes of disability, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion that justified imperial rule in Ireland and the forms of oppression that continued after independence. Marion Quirici identifies models of citizenship and creative autonomy in Irish modernist literature that valorize vulnerability over ability and interdependence over independence. She uncovers a history in which an entire nation, Ireland, was characterized as disabled and therefore “not fit for freedom.” Beyond symbolism, the Famine and decades of emigration led to a perception that Ireland’s racial stocks were depleted, and that those who remained were feeble and few. The fraught relationship between disability and Irishness provides context for Quirici’s analysis of modernist Irish literature. Revivalists such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Pádraic Pearse, and the Gaelic Athletic Association created new mythologies of Irish ability to counter imperial stereotypes, tacitly reinforcing the idea of disability as a disqualification for sovereignty. Certain Irish modernists, however—James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, Brian O’Nolan, and Christy Brown—called the “fitness for freedom” ideology into question. These authors allow us to disentangle disability from unfitness and scrutinize its relationship to liberation. In their work, disability becomes an avenue for exploring the human experience and discovering the inherent creativity and collaborative potential of an interdependent life.

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This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both of the contradictions of our present moment and brief glimmers of what an emancipated world might look like.
Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer, with work appearing in a number of outlets including London Review of Books, The Drift and e-flux. Her previous books are Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now.

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