Role
Associate Professor and Head of the Discipline of Arabic Languages and Cultures, University of Sydney, NSW (Australia).
Bio
Lucia Sorbera is Associate Professor of Arabic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Sydney, where she directs the Discipline of Arabic Language and Cultures. She researches colonial and postcolonial history in West Asia and North Africa, with a particular focus on women, gender, and sexuality.
She studied and lived in Italy, Lebanon, and Egypt, and in 2006 she earned a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her thesis, on the women's movements in Egypt and Italy during the interwar period, received the 2007 Italian Society of Historians' Award for best thesis in women's and gender history. Before taking up a teaching position at the University of Sydney in 2011, she taught at the Universities of Macerata, Milan State University, and Verona.
She was a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna (2023), a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center (2022), and a Fernand Braudel Senior Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2021). She serves on the editorial boards of the women's and gender history series of the Italian Society of Historians and Viella, and is co-editor of "Third Space" for the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, and of ArabLit (IPO, Rome). She is a founder of the WoMENAustralia network, which brings together scholars of the Middle East and North Africa in Australia.