NEW ROCHELLE, NY — Mona Eltahawy, an award-winning columnist and international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues and global feminism, will deliver this year’s Dowell Lecture at The College of New Rochelle (CNR).
The Dowell Lecture will be held Thursday, March 10, at 7 p.m. at CNR’s Romita Auditorium. Eltahawy’s lecture is titled “Feminism: The Social and Sexual Revolution Goes Global.” The event, which is free and open to the public, has been held annually since 1987.
Eltahawy lives in New York City and Cairo. Her commentaries have appeared on The New York Times Opinion pages and other publications, and she is a frequent guest analyst on television and radio talk shows. Her book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, was released in April 2015.
Eltahawy’s resume is loaded with honors and achievements:
· Newsweek named her one of its “150 Fearless Women of 2012,” and she was among those featured in TIME’s “People of the Year.”
· The Missouri School of Journalism awarded her its Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism in 2012, and the Columbia Journalism Review named her as one of 20 women in the media to watch.
· She served as a major media spokesperson during the 2011 revolution that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, prompting the feminist website Jezebel to describe her as “The Woman Explaining Egypt to the West.”
· Before moving to the U.S. in 2000, she worked for many years as a news reporter in the Middle East. She spent nearly six years as a Reuters correspondent and reported from Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China.
“The Women’s Studies Program has a long standing commitment to examining how gender, as a social construct, interacts with other forms of identity, such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexual identity,” said Rebecca Lafleur, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of Women’s Studies at The College of New Rochelle. “Mona’s work as a journalist and feminist activist focusing on Arab and Muslim women speaks directly to this goal. We welcome Mona here and thank her for contributing to the knowledge that will empower women to speak up within their communities and beyond.”
Dr. George B. Dowell established the Dowell Lecture to highlight women in the arts, politics, history and religion in memory of his sister Elvira, who received her Bachelor of Arts degree in history from CNR in 1936. The lecture is sponsored by the Women’s Studies Committee of the School of Arts and Sciences.
