Digitizing Women’s and Gender History

As security concerns and border restrictions increasingly make research travel to and between countries in the Middle East challenging, how can scholars use digital resources to study women and gender history? A roundtable panel at the 2016 Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting in Boston, “Digitizing Women’s and Gender History: A Way Forward for the Field?,” brought together scholars from four projects to offer working answers regarding gender and digital archives: Hoda Elsadda of Women and Memory Forum (Al-Marʾa wa al-Thakira) in Cairo; Afsaneh Najmabadi of the digital archive, Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran; Seçil Yılmaz and Susanna Ferguson of the “Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World” podcast series; and Akram Khater of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University. Some of these projects produce content for a digital platform and others use a digital platform to preserve material and make it more...