Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Cultural Studies at Cairo University. She has been extensively involved with research on Arabic and English travel writings. In addition, she is concerned with gender and women’s studies. Among her scholarly writings are Interpreting the Orient: Travellers in Egypt and the Near East, edited by Paul and Janet Starkey (2001) and Modernism and Postmodernism: East and West (2001). She is also the editor, with Deborah Manley, of Traveling through Sinai: from the Fourth to the Twenty-First Century (2006); Traveling through Egypt: from 450 B.C. to the Twentieth Century (2008) and Egypt and the Nile through Writers' Eyes (2008). She has also published several articles in local and internationsl newspapers including Al-Ahram Weekly. She is a co-founder of the Women and Memory Forum.