About

Sherine Hamdy is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She joined UC Irvine in July 2017 after serving as a professor at Brown University for eleven years. Her scholarly work includes the book Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt, published by University of California Press in 2012. She is currently coauthoring a manuscript with Soha Bayoumi (Harvard) on the role of doctors in the popular uprisings that took place in Egypt from 2011 to 2013. Additionally, she is working on a young adult graphic novel under contract with Penguin Random House, which narrates the coming of age story of a Muslim American girl.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Philosophy
• Environmental ethics
• Engineering ethics
• Epistemology
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Anthropology
• Aesthetics
• Internal medicine
• Engineering
• Theology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Drawing Dissent from the Assad Regime to Beirut Uprisings

  Journal of Middle East Women s Studies · 2026-03-31

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article describes Syrian artist Lina Ghaibeh’s role in establishing the field of Arab comics as a pioneer in Arabic graphic narrative and animation, as an archivist of Arab comics through her role as the founding director of the Arab Comics Center in Beirut, as a creator of personal graphic narratives, and as teacher to generations of university students. The article delves more deeply into her work in the last two capacities: as a producer of comics and as a mentor of young comics students. In both these roles, the article demonstrates how Ghaibeh draws on the heritage of Arab visual culture and merges it with first-person narratives that promote creative expression, while acknowledging the constraints of political repression and instability. Through the juxtaposition of image and text in sequential panels, Ghaibeh summons the reader to participate in reimagining unfolding history in the Arab world. Ghaibeh’s techniques include (1) the use of Arabic script as an embodied, living character that emplaces comics within the Arab setting, (2) the amplification of the first-person voice and shrinking down of state propaganda to size, and (3) displaying challenges to state discourse, and visually recreating that which authoritarian governments have erased and displaying challenges to state discourse.

  PublisherDOI

• Shared anthropology of the Middle East: Essays on media in honor of Faye Ginsburg

  Visual Anthropology Review · 2024-09-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The articles in this special issue are the outcome of the panel: “Papers in Honor of Faye Ginsburg: Visual and Media Anthropology in the Middle East,” which was held virtually for the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings of November 2021. The reach of Ginsburg's work as well as her mentorship through the creation of NYU's Graduate Program in Culture & Media has shaped the ethnography of media and visual anthropology across a diversity of geographic regions. In this particular issue, we bring together scholars of SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa, a term that more broadly encompasses what is often referred to as the Middle East) whose projects are deeply influenced by Ginsburg's scholarship on shared anthropology, collaborative media practices and cultural activism. This introduction includes excerpts from a conversation with Ginsburg.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Visualizing erasure: Co‐creating comics and animation from revolutionary street art to Nubian memories of displacement in Egypt

  Visual Anthropology Review · 2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article discusses how Faye Ginsburg's work on Indigenous filmmaking and commitment to shared anthropology inspired us to pursue unconventional forms of visual anthropology adapted to our own ethnographic contexts in post‐revolutionary Egypt. Specifically, we discuss Hamdy's work on the collaborative graphic novel Lissa and Moll's collaborative animation short Hanina. The affordances of these illustrated genres and mediums for collaborative co‐creation with our interlocutors enabled better ways to depict that which is no longer tangibly present yet persists in memories and longings. The specific histories of each media resonated with how the communities sought to represent themselves, a powerful example of what Ginsburg calls “aesthetic accountability.” We also reflect on how comics and animation, through greater anonymity, can help us attain safety as a production value under authoritarianism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Trauma of Medical Training in Two Webcomics: A Call for Multimodal Citation

  Medical Anthropology Quarterly · 2023-03-25 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Medical anthropologists have long wrestled with the problematic mind/body opposition that plagues both biomedicine and Euro-American epistemologies. However, medical anthropology as a field has been surprisingly reticent to engage with visual media forms and creative expression, whether film, comics, or animation, even as these media have been shown to augment the bodily and emotional impact on the viewers as compared to solely text-based media. This essay is an attempt to rethink how medical anthropologists can engage more with visual media, taking as an example two comic memoirs created by physicians about their medical training: "Healing Alone" (2019) and "Dailies of a Junior Doc" (2021). These webcomics effectively convey strong emotional and bodily experiences tied to medical education, and are powerful examples of how comics can be leveraged to reexamine assumptions about who can be doctors, how medical training molds them, and what sustains their practice. [medical training, webcomics, visual media, Cartesianism].

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Comics by Middle Eastern Genderqueer and Women Artists

  2022-12-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter presents a discussion of the works of women and genderqueer comic artists from the Middle East and its diaspora and categorizes them into the following sections: (1) graphic memoirs, (2) graphic fiction, and (3) explicitly feminist messaging. Many of the works written in the style of graphic memoirs focus on the social destruction wrought by militarism and warfare, particularly as experienced and narrated from the perspective of children. The fictional graphic works discussed are also informed by the political context of lives in the Middle East and the diaspora and deal with themes of political repression, Orientalism, and cultural misunderstanding. Our final section turns to the use of comics to spread feminist awareness, aimed at both introducing feminist theories and at shifting behaviors and perceptions around gender-based violence and oppression. The chapter demonstrates that comics from the region have allowed for an opening up of expressive culture by centering the voices of women. Whether explicitly feminist or implicitly so, these stories have captured perspectives otherwise confined to the margins.

  PublisherDOI

• Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and Medical Mobilization in Post-revolutionary Egypt

  Culture Medicine and Psychiatry · 2022 · 4 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking Islamic Legal Ethics in Egypt’s Organ Transplant Debate

  University of South Carolina Press eBooks · 2021 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law
  PublisherDOI

• Crafting Lissa, an Ethno-Graphic Story

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2021-01-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses <italic>Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution</italic>, an inaugural book of the University of Toronto Press that is based on Sherine Hamdy's ethnographic work on organ transplantation in Egypt and Coleman Nye's research on cancer genetics in the United States. It describes <italic>Lissa</italic> as a graphic work of what the groundbreaking ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch called “ethnofiction.” It also follows two women in <italic>Lissa</italic> as they grapple with difficult medical decisions in the context of the popular uprisings that began in January 2011. The chapter explores the collaborative dimension of <italic>Lissa</italic> at the heart of its success in reaching a range of audiences within and beyond anthropology, while also making valuable methodological contributions to the field. It cites <italic>Lissa</italic> as a unique example of the possibilities of collaborative scholarship to unsettle conventional ideas of authorship, expertise, voice, text, theory, and study.

  PublisherDOI

• EthnoGRAPHIC: An Interview

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2021 · 4 citations

  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Sociology

  The interview focuses on the book series EthnoGRAPHIC (University of Toronto Press) and the graphic novel Lissa. A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship and Revolution, the first book of the series. Four points arise from the interview with authors Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye, and with the filmmaker Francesco Dragone, who documented their research process. First, the problem of funding multimedia and innovative research projects, aimed to find new ways of communicating social research. Second, the question to what extent such projects are recognized and legitimated within the Academia. Third, the audience potentially interested in reading (ethno)graphic novels and, relatedly, their usability in teaching social sciences. Finally, the concerns and practicalities in putting together different narrative forms. This effort of combining several ways of representing social reality, also concerns the organization of the research itself as well as conducting fieldwork and the capability of thinking “graphically” from scratch instead of adapting textual data collected during the research.

  PublisherDOI

• 11 CRAFTING LISSA, AN ETHNO-GRAPHIC STORY

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2021-01-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Coleman Nye

  7 shared

• Eileen Wright

  Providence College

  4 shared

• David Marshall

  2 shared

• Eduardo Barberis

  University of Urbino

  2 shared

• Barbara Grüning

  University of Milano-Bicocca

  2 shared

• John Hedley Brooke

  2 shared

• Soha Bayoumi

  Johns Hopkins University

  2 shared

• Rowan Williams

  2 shared

Labs

• LISSA Graphic NovelPI

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  New York University

  2006