Amina Elbendary
Amina Elbendary is currently an adjunct faculty member at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo (AUC). She earned her PhD in July 2007 from the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation was entitled “Faces in the Crowd: Urban Protests in Egypt and Syria in the Late Middle Ages.”
Since 2004, she has been a member of the Women and Memory Forum. She is also a member of the Egyptian Society for Historical Studies and the British Federation of Women Graduates.
From 1999-2003, she worked as a senior staff writer at the Egyptian English-language weekly newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly where she wrote articles covering the Egyptian and Arab cultural scene, including reviews of academic publications and fiction, was Assistant Editor of the monthly Books Supplement and editor of special supplements such as one commemorating the 50th anniversary of the July 1952 Revolution and another commemorating the bicentennial of Muhammad Ali’s rise to power.
In 2000, she earned her MA degree from the Department of Arabic Studies at AUC having written a thesis on “Histories of the Muslim Hero: Medieval and Modern Perceptions of al-Zahir Baybars.” She earned her BA in Political Science, with a minor in European History, from AUC, graduating suma cum laude in 1996.
She was the recipient of Rioyichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Graduate Fellowship from 1996-1998. In 1998 her paper “The Sultan, The Tyrant and the Hero: Changing Medieval Perceptions of al-Zahir Baybars,” won the prize for Best Graduate Student Paper on a Medieval Topic from Middle East Medievalists.
Dr Elbendary is currently working on a book based on her doctoral dissertation analyzing and comparing incidents of urban protest in Egyptian and Syrian cities in the late Mamluk and early Ottoman periods.
Her publications include “The historiography of protest in late Mamluk and early Ottoman Egypt and Syria,” International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter 43 (Spring 2007); with Huda al-Sa‘di, *Al-Awqāf fi sutūr wa suwar* (Cairo: Women and Memory Forum, 2006); “The Worst of Times: Crisis Management and al-shidda al-`uzma,” in Money, Land and Trade: An Economic History of the Muslim Mediterranean, ed. Nelly Hanna (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002); “The Sultan, The Tyrant and the Hero: Changing Medieval Perceptions of al-Zahir Baybars,” Mamluk Studies Review 5 (2001).