Shireen Hamza
Science in Human Culture 2023-2025
Department of History
Areas of Interest History of Medicine, History of the Body, History of Sexuality, Sound Studies, Medieval History, Islamic Studies, Indian Ocean History, South Asian History, Middle East History Biography Shireen Hamza obtained her PhD from Harvard's Department of the History of Science in May 2023, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. She produces works in sound, movement, and other artistic media, alongside and in conversation with her scholarly publications. Shireen's work lives on the shores of the history of medicine, Islamic Studies, Indian Ocean History, and the history of sexuality. At Northwestern, they will be working on a book, Environment & Medicine in Medieval Islam, which draws on Arabic and Persian medical manuscripts from across the western Indian Ocean world to investigate the role of place and locality in knowledge production. Shireen will also begin work on her second book project about sound in medieval Islamic cities, interrogating the ways filmmakers in and beyond these regions have imagined their soundscapes in the last century. Courses Taught Podcasting the History of Science (Fall 2023); Histories of Asian Medicines (Spring 2024)
