Pollard, Lisa 1963-

PERSONAL:

Born in 1963. Education: University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1997.

ADDRESSES:

Office—601 S. College Rd., Wilmington, NC 28403. E-mail—pollardl@uncwil.edu.

CAREER:

Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, CA, lecturer, 1996; University of North Carolina, Wilmington, assistant professor, 1997-2003, associate professor of history, 2003—. North Carolina Humanities Council Speakers' Forum, speaker, 1999—; Middle East Studies Association of America (MESA), governing board member, 2005-08; American Research Center in Egypt, scholar-in-residence, 2005-06; Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Seminar (SERMEISS), governing board member, 2006-08. Also reviewer of manuscripts and proposals for Oxford University Press, Duke University Press, University Press of Florida, Palgrave Press, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Carolina Seminar in Comparative Islamic Studies.

MEMBER:

Muslim Networks Consortium, Middle East Studies Association of America, American Historical Association, Southeast Middle East and Islamic Studies Association.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Mosely Fellowship for Summer Research, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2001; faculty fellowship, Center for Arabic Study Abroad, 2001; Center for Teaching Excellence fellowship for curricular development, University of North Carolina, 2001; Andrew W. Mellon Seed Grant for research in Egypt, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2001; Faculty Research Initiatives Award, University of North Carolina, 2005; National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for research at the American Research Center in Egypt, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2005-06.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Lynne Haney) Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt (1805-1923), University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2005.

Contributor to anthologies, including Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Middle East: Houses in Motion, edited by Relli Shecter, Palgrave Press (New York, NY), 2004, and Beyond the Exotic: Women's Histories in Early Islamic Societies, edited by Amira Sonbol, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 2005. Contributor of scholarly articles to Arab Studies Journal and Social Politics, and book reviews to Social History, Hawwa: Journal of Women in the Middle East and Islamic Societies, H-Net Gender, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, and International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Book review editor for Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lisa Pollard is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Her teaching and research focus on the Middle East, Islam, and gender issues. Pollard has written numerous articles and reviews and edited, with Lynne Haney, the anthology Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context.

In her first book, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt (1805-1923), Pollard explores how family structure and notions of gender shaped the Egyptian national identity throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Pollard highlights the cross-cultural exchange between Europe and Egypt, and especially how British rationales for colonizing and occupying Egypt informed Egypt's own debates over modernization and reform, especially in terms of gender roles and social practices, such as polygamous marriage. According to Mario M. Ruiz, writing for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, "Pollard skillfully demonstrates throughout her book [that] competing definitions of familial-political metaphors and bourgeois ‘Egyptian-ness’ during this time period brought together the Ottoman-Egyptian elite, British officials, and Arabophone Egyptian nationalists in their mutual quest to create a modern, progressive Egyptian nation." To make her argument, Pollard draws from an impressive array of primary materials. These include missionaries' and governmental officials' personal papers archived in Great Britain, the United States, and Egypt, as well as Egyptian and European travel accounts, and Egyptian political materials from the period. Ruiz called the book "intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking," and Mary Ann Fay called the book "engaging, informative, and well-written," in her Middle East Journal review. She added: "Pollard has written an important, well-researched book on the history of imperialism and resistance in Egypt at a time when the modern state was taking shape." Wilson Chacko Jacob, writing for Arab Studies Journal, called the book "a fine example of this new historical scholarship, based on sound research and solid analysis."

This is not to say that the project is without flaw. Although Ruiz called the book "largely successful" and "admirable in terms of its theoretical and historical scope," he nonetheless felt that "the discussions of the political actors depicted in this work are somewhat limited by the nature of the author's sources," and that a more systematic use of the Egyptian archives "could have provided this excellent book with an even more nuanced analysis of the familial agents and institutions that gave rise to the modern Egyptian state." Fay observed that "Pollard's study leaves unanswered questions about the similarities between the British justification for occupation and the Egyptian project for reform of its social and political life to achieve liberation and national independence." Jacob similarly felt that "one of the most significant problems faced by this work is that in the spirit of revising the periodization of the conventional historiography of Egypt, it cannot interrogate what was in fact the difference made by colonialism."

Nonetheless, reviewers found Nurturing the Nation an admirable work. Ruiz concluded his review by admiring the "theoretical sophistication," analysis, and "cogent and probing insights" of this "timely and welcome addition to the field of gender and colonial/post-colonial studies." According to Mona L. Russell, a reviewer for the Historian, Pollard's "ambitious project" is "quite appropriate for advanced undergraduates, providing an easy transition to historical theory. This work would be highly effective in upper-division or graduate-level courses on nationalism, identity, gender, education, and imperialism, as well as in the expected arenas of the modern Middle East and modern Egypt."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December 1, 2005, Nancy Gallagher, review of Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt (1805-1923), p. 1635.

Arab Studies Journal, fall, 2005/spring, 2006, Wilson Chacko Jacob, review of Nurturing the Nation.

Contemporary Sociology, May 1, 2005, review of Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context, p. 334; July 1, 2005, review of Nurturing the Nation, p. 436.

Historian, March 22, 2007, Mona L. Russell, review of Nurturing the Nation, p. 90.

Middle East Journal, March 22, 2007, Mary Ann Fay, review of Nurturing the Nation, p. 354.

ONLINE

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.h-net.org/ (July 1, 2006), Mario M. Ruiz, review of Nurturing the Nation.

University of North Carolina at Wilmington Web site,http://www.uncw.edu/ (July 13, 2008), profile of author.